August 27, 2022 7pm
Performance Works NW
4625 SE 67th Ave, Portland

Touch system ✿✿✿ is an emerging choreographic work by Alembic resident Blue McCall, taking place within a custom sound installation by Jamondria Harris (meroitic). Touch system explores the tension between image making and embodiment, shifting between high-impact physicality and moments of sculptural stillness. 

Join us for an informal open studio showing, to celebrate the end of the group’s summer studio sessions and to launch our fall performance season! Guests will receive a cyberpunk print with access codes to our upcoming performance dates within Portland’s experimental music and art scene. Come watch us thrash into new experimental genres. A rotating ensemble of 8 dancers will run through the following collaborative scores: 

✿ stack

✿ ur not an image but a feeling

✿ data mosh pit

✿ body on glitchy loop

✿ triple stack 

✿ switch stack

✿ pendulum, or boys be bad behavin 

Touch system ✿✿✿ features dancers Wolfgang Black, Ysabella Bonnieux Richard, Sam Cimino, Nikki Cormaci, Emma Lutz-Higgins, Heidi Kleder, Sophie Kongshaug, and Hannah Krafcik. Our in-house creative coder is radical noise girl Ashely Ona Bott.

Free or ticket by donation. This is a fundraiser event, all proceeds going towards honorariums for ensemble dancers.

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ARTIST BIOS

Jamondria Harris, meroitic is a living black/indigenous/queer interdisciplinary artist, poet and composer. Their work uses words, sounds, wires, instruments, textiles & what falls into their hands to engage with blackness, desire, spirit/source, decolonization, fairy tales, & embodiment. Their sound art emerges from deep-listening fluidity between rhythm & source, engendering sonic cartographies woven from samples, feedback, the electromagnetic field of bodies & rooms and both digital and analog synthesizer soundscapes.

Blue McCall is a multidisciplinary artist from Southern Appalachia, based in Portland, OR. Their work borrows from life, labor and erotics. Blue dances for hyperpop, metal, and experimental musicians, and is a 2022 Alembic Artist in Residence at Performance Works NW. Their choreographic style features high-risk contact, non-binary partnering, and quotidian movement. Blue is the the author of Slip Wip, a multimedia fantasy novella critical of labor relations in the *ick factory. The novella is released serially on No Bounds Radio (London/Manchester). Their painting practice has been supported by the Cooley Gallery, Conduit at Utopian Visions Art Fair, Portland Textile Month, and RACC. Blue works across mediums and scenes in an effort to decentralize the hierarchical workings of art worlds.