Showing posts with label wood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wood. Show all posts

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Jennifer Hicks (& Matt Samolis)
- Country Shoes May 25 2009







photos: Bob Raymond (MAG)

Jennifer Hicks (former MAG) and Matt Samolis
"Country Shoes"
Mon May 25, 2009: butoh performance with live music

Video of Jennifer Hicks and Matt Samolis "Country Shoes"

Jennifer Hicks / Matt Samolis : Country Shoes @mobius 05-25-09 from MobiusArtistsGroup on Vimeo.

Jen's in depth study of Butoh and other forms of movement are a natural pairing for Matt's unusual flute style which also draws largely on eastern cultural influences.

The politics of shoes is the politics of leather, which is the politics of meat, which is the politics of land use and corn and fuel and hunger and of poverty. It is of confinement and freedom, allowing one to do something one could not do otherwise, while also restricting so much on another end. But this is a simple dance in a complicated world, a series of movements which will be performed in shoes made of only wood and rope from China. These are shoes of the land and shoes of the poor and shoes that limit ones movements.

Jennifer Hicks M.F.A., R.Y.T, director of CHIMERAlab Dance Project, is a performer, choreographer, teacher and visual artist. She received her MFA from Naropa University in Contemporary Performance, her BFA from Tufts University and Degree in Fine Arts from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston. She is a guest artist for the 4th year at Naropa University in the MFA Contemporary Performance Department directing The Embodied Poetics Project. Jennifer has won several prestigious awards for her work including The Traveling Scholars Award from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Franklin Furnace for an installation/performance about medicine called “Training For Uncertainty”. She is an alumni of the experimental performance collective called Mobius and a founding member of the former Pan 9 in Boston.

As a dancer, Jennifer studied ballet, modern and jazz since childhood but began her interest in Butoh back in the mid 1980's. She began to study Butoh seriously in the early 1990’s at the San Francisco Butoh Festival. Her main performance influences are Tatsumi Hijikata, KATSURA Kan, Maureen Fleming, Wendell Beavers, Barbara Dilley, puppet work, early cartoons, nature and silent films. She has been dancing in KASTURA Kans International Dance Company for over 8 years and has her own company based in Boston and Boulder CO. She has been teaching movement, creating original work and performing for over 25 years. Ms. Hicks is a certified Shintaido Instructor, certified TranceDance International Facilitator and a Yoga Instructor registered with the National Yoga Alliance. Her training also includes graduate level training in The20Viewpoints with Wendell Beavers, Roy Hart Vocal Training with Ethie Friend and Jonathan Hart, Body Mind Centering® principles with Erika Berland, Suzuki Actors Training with members of SITI Company, Contemplative Dance with Barbara Dilley, Vocal Training with Meredith Monk, Lecoq Neutral Mask with Amy Russell, Grotowski Based Physical Theater with Stephen Wangh, Performance Art with Marilyn Arsem (founding director of Mobius) and Moment Work from Moises Kaufman and Leigh Fondakowski.

She has also studied shiatsu massage and acupuncture at Boston School of Shiatsu and New England School of Acupuncture. She studied her puppetry with Julie Szabo ( who worked with Bread and Puppet for over 10 years) and Julie Morrison (who trained at the University of Connecticut's Puppet Arts Program). Both Julie’s enjoys “putting an edgy twist on traditional forms of puppetry, as well as exploring connections between the puppet, the audience, and the performer”. This work translates into puppetry techniques for the body which Jennifer uses as a tool in choreography.

Links:

http://www.fragilecreep.com

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxG9Q99izZE

http://www.archive.org/details/TrioImprovisationsForVoiceFluteAndPreparedCelloOpenCircuits

Monday, June 8, 2009

James Ellis Coleman
- "Stay In Your Own Backyard"

James Ellis Coleman: "Stay In Your Own Backyard"
mixed media installation

photo: Bob Raymond (MAG)


video still: Jane Wang (MAG)


video still: Jane Wang


An installation that examines the subtle relationships between the images of shoes and the coded messages of turn of the century song lyrics about African Americans and the Irish.

As the Artist states:
“Lyrics that were intended to be humorous but are in fact racially insensitive."


James Ellis Coleman has an MFA and a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art. He has had solo shows at the Sherborn Public Library, Sherborn MA., Harris Berman Diversity Gallery, Tuffs, Watertown MA, Gallery at Concepts, So. Natick MA, and The Center for Art in Natick, Natick MA. He has also shown in group shows at the Fuller Museum of Art, Brockton, MA, Cambridge Art Association, Cambridge, MA, MPG Contemporary, Boston, MA, Limner Art Gallery, Hudson NY, Amazing Things Art Center, (juried), Framingham MA, Brush Art Gallery and Studios, Lowell MA, Hera Gallery, (juried), Wakefield RI, and the annual juried show at the Zullo Gallery, Medfield MA.

He was honored to have a commission from Urban Arts, in Boston Ma. in 2004 as well as a residency at The Vermont Studios in Johnson Vermont in 2005 and won first prize at the Amazing Things Art Center in Framingham Ma.


Notes from the Curator:

1. You can see/hear a brief conversation with James while he is de-installing his piece if you watch the two videos posted on June 6th from the POV of a visitor to the exhibit.

2. A couple of visitors responded to and "got" this piece instantly: the journalist G. Jeffrey MacDonald who often reports on social and religious issues and the other is the jazz pianist and vocalist Carolyn Wilkins who previously had heard about the song but had never previously seen the lyrics.