Dance Showcase 2020
The Flea welcomes its Anchor Partners for a spectacular showcase of contemporary dance. Designed for presenters and fans alike, the performances feature LAVA, Tiffany Mills Company, Elisa Monte Dance, and The Bang Group. A perfect sampler of 4 companies at the top of their form presenting excerpts of these choreographers’ most recent work.
PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE
Friday, January 10 @ 8pm
Saturday, January 11 @ 5pm
Sunday, January 12 @ 12pm
Elisa Monte Dance presents excerpts from Persona Umbra
Persona Umbra is a duet created by Elisa Monte Dance’s Artistic Director, Tiffany Rea-Fisher in 2014 and started her career as an in-demand choreographer for dance, theater, fashion, and music videos.
Tiffany Mills Company presents excerpts from Not then, not yet
Choreographer Tiffany Mills’s Not then, not yet, created in collaboration with dramaturge Kay Cummings, Puerto Rican composer Angélica Negrón and French vocalist/composer Muriel Louveau, examines states of transition, drawing inspiration from the liminal space between endings and new beginnings. The artists’ initial interest in liminality comes from Mary Shelley’s life and early writing—specifically her examination of the threshold between creation and destruction, integration and isolation. Ruminating on what it means to be in between, the collaborators now look at portals and passageways through a 21st-century lens. Negrón’s blend of electro-acoustics mixed with classical instrumentation and found sounds, Louveau’s extreme vocal registers and neoclassical influences, and Mills’s raw and unhinged movement create a kinetically charged world that speaks to the subconscious.
Jody Oberfelder presents Madame Ovary and Object Place/Walking to Present
MADAME OVARY (excerpts)
Madame Ovary is a contemporary exploration of the body as a site of intuition, agency, and identity with choreography by Jody Oberfelder, music composed by Missy Mazzoli (funded by New Music USA), and lighting by Kathy Kaufmann. This new work uses Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary’s story of a corseted life amid 19th Century social constructions as a springboard to address and provoke conversation on today’s gender revolution and the #metoo movement. Oberfelder boldly weaves together small stories, broad contexts, and big dancing. With empathy, humor, embroidered breast plates, and badass rocker panache, Oberfelder addresses an ever-evolving terrain of womanhood. Madame Ovary is the third work in Oberfelder’s body-part trilogy, following the heart, 4Chambers, (performed as an immersive installation on Governors Island and a former hospital in Brooklyn, 2013-14) and The Brain Piece, (at New York Live Arts in June 2017). This time Oberfelder focuses on the gut and genitals asking how are we defined by our bodies — or not?
Premiered May 2019 at the Flea Theater
Original Music: Missy Mazzoli (with funding from New Music USA)
Dancers: Emily Giovine, Mei Yamanaka, Mary Madsen, Maya Orchin
Costumes: Jody Oberfelder
OBJECT PLACE / WALKING TO PRESENT
Jody Oberfelder and her company will give a taste of a recent site-specific work performed in Plymouth UK. Object Place / Walking to Present is an interactive site specific work that is tailor-made to a presenter’s needs and resources. The audience is cued to bring a personal object, something insignificant, significant, or magnificent.
The Bang Group presents Tender Traps
The Bang Group will present Tender Traps, a halting romance powered by rhythm and set to rehearsal outtakes and recordings of Debbie Reynolds, Frank Sinatra and Doris Day. It brings a man and a woman together in ambivalent but ardent couplings to songs by James Van Heusen, Sammy Cahn and Johnny Mercer. Choreographer David Parker brings his wit, musicality and rhythmic vigor to the bittersweet grappling between the lushness of the American Songbook and the vagaries of modern life.
Tiffany Mills founded the NYC-based Tiffany Mills Company in 2000 and has created over 20 works performed with a “fearless sense of freedom and exhilaration” (Washington Post). Mills’ process of creation is collaborative, ensemble-based, and multidisciplinary. She collaborates to blur lines between mediums and to discover layered methods of constructing dances (drawn from partnering, improvisation, and somatic modalities). Mills’ work focuses on the vulnerability of being human through investigating themes of communication, connection, relationship, exposure, breakdown, and transformation. Mills celebrates differences amongst the performers. She challenges the audience to be in an active role — to participate, experience, absorb and respond. NYC company performance highlights: The Flea, La MaMa, BAM Fisher, Guggenheim Museum, Duke on 42nd, Danspace Project, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Symphony Space, Bryant Park Contemporary Dance Series, Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors, Dancing in the Streets, Joyce SoHo, and Movement Research. National highlights: PICA/TBA Festival (OR), Wexner Center (OH), Contemporary Dance Theater (OH), Jacob’s Pillow (MA), Dance Place (DC), Austin Dance Festival (TX). International highlights: Russia, Italy, Mexico, Canada. Teaching highlights: Trisha Brown Studios, Gibney, Peridance, ACDA, universities and festivals nationally/internationally, plus the Company’s annual Summer Partnering Intensive. Residencies: Tisch Summer Dance Festival, CUNY Dance Initiative, BAM/PDP, Joyce Mellon Anchor Tenant, Baryshnikov Arts Center, LMCC Swing Space. Funding highlights: Asian Cultural Council, Mertz Gilmore (via La MaMa), Evelyn Sharp, Harkness (via HERE), NYC/DCA, Bossak/Heilbron, Sorin Trust, Puffin, Meet the Composer, American Music Center, New Music USA. www.tiffanymillscompany.org
The Bang Group is a rhythm-driven, New York-based dance company which spans contemporary and percussive forms. The company, founded and directed by Jeffrey Kazin and David Parker celebrates its 24th anniversary this season. TBG has toured and performed widely throughout North America and Europe appearing in The Netherlands, The Czech Republic, Austria, Croatia, Scotland, Belgium, Germany, Slovakia, France, Switzerland and numerous cities in Italy. It is presented regularly in New York City, NYLA (Formerly DTW), Danaspace Project, Dance Now NYC, Symphony Space 92Y to name but a few. The Bang Group has made its second home in Boston through sustained partnerships with Summer Stages Dance (13 seasons), The ICA, and The Dance Complex. The company is also in residence annually at The Yard on Martha’s Vineyard and at The West End Theater on Manhattan’s upper west side. It supports and presents the work of a wide range of artists through its thrice-yearly series called Soaking WET at the West End Theater and its Dance Now Boston initiative which commissions new work created for cabaret spaces and enters its fifth annual season in June 2018. Next week, TBG will reprise its much-praised program of dances by Parker, James Waring and Aileen Passloff reflecting on Parker’s artistic forebears at the 92nd Street Y, and is creating a new music/dance work composed by Pauline Kim Harris to premiere at The Stone in NYC in July. www.thebanggroup.com or follow us on FaceBook.
Elisa Monte Dance bridges cultural barriers through the universal language of dance. The company’s work emphasizes three main objectives: train and maintain a corps of professional dancers of multi-ethnic origin, capable of meeting the artistic and physical demands of the choreography; educate individuals in the art of movement and in appreciation of live dance performance; and collaborate with distinguished artists across other disciplines. www.elisamontedance.org
Jody Oberfelder is a director, choreographer, and filmmaker, creating visceral experiences for audiences, onstage and in alternative sites. Recent work: Object Place Walking (Walking New Movements Conference, Plymouth UK, Life Traveler Performed on bridges in Munich, Berlin, and Frankfurt, and on a sidewalk in NYC, Madame Ovary (The Flea Theater NYC) and Object Place for Astor Place, an historical “guided tour” (Department of Transportation, NYC) Things (South Bank’s Flowstate, Brisbane, Australia), On the Move Shortly, (St. Pancras Station, London), Castle Walk, (Braga, Portugal), The Brain Piece, Int’l Nanotechnology Summit, Dance Place and New York Live Arts. www.jodyoberfelder.com