Defibrillator Gallery + SITE/less + Pivot Arts proudly present

Video Corpo

three programs exploring the place between movement and video

BRIDGEPORT | Defibrillator | Zhou B Art Center | 1029 W 35TH ST

featuring video installations by :

NOBLE SQUARE | SITE/less | 1250 W AUGUSTA BLVD

featuring video installations by :

EDGEWATER| Pivot Arts | Chicago Filmmakers | 5720 N RIDGE AVE

FRI 30 NOV | 7:30-9PM | A one-night-only screening featuring: Sarah C. Prinz + Danny Rosenberg + Amy Wilkinson | Austin Forbord + Amy Dowling | Tommy Pascal | Sara Zalek. Post-show discussion moderated by Pivot Arts director Julieanne Ehre [more info below].

Suggested $10 donation for opening events – advance tickets found HERE. Gallery hours at SITE/less and Defibrillator are free and open to the public.

Three presenters of experimental performance are collaborating in three Chicago neighborhoods to present Video Corpo, a festival of video work celebrating movement-based artists who offer an alternative corporeal perspective by embracing video as an extension of their practice. Curated by the directors of the three presenters—Michelle Kranicke (Zephyr and SITE/less in Noble Square), Joseph Ravens (Defibrillator Gallery at Zhou B Art Center in Bridgeport), and Julieanne Ehre (Pivot Arts in Edgewater at Chicago Filmmakers)—Video Corpo focuses on broadening the audience for experimental time-based artists by creating a platform for viewing their work beyond traditional live performance. “We are inviting audiences to leave their comfort zones— geographically and aesthetically—to discover new neighborhoods, new art venues, and ways that artists are showcasing the body in a two-dimensional format,” said Kranicke.

BRIDGEPORT | FRI 16 NOV

Defibrillator Gallery [a.k.a. DFBRL8R] is an international platform for Performance Art. Contextualizing performance in the realm of visual art, DFBRL8R embraces those who look to the body in concert and conversation with time, space, object, nature, architecture, or society. Bold and courageous programming aims to provoke thought and stimulate discourse surrounding underrepresented voices and time-based practices. The Zhou B Art Center is a private non-government funded complex that facilitates the exchange of contemporary art between Chicago and the international art community. Founded in 2004 by the Zhou Brothers in Chicago’s historic Bridgeport neighborhood.

Marianne Kim [www.mariannekim.com ] is a Korean American interdisciplinary artist working in screendance, multimedia installation, choreography, and performance art. Her areas of research include the disorienting effects of technologized labor, cultural identity, consumerism, and most recently the forces within industrial food production and promotion that mediate race, gender, and bodies. Her most recent presentations include Athens Video Dance Project, Dance Film Association/Film Society of Lincoln Center, Wexner Center for the Arts, International Screendance Festival at ADF, MIVSC São Carlos Videodance Festival, Agite y Sirva Festival Itinerante de Videodanza, San Francisco Dance Film Festival, Ciné-Corps Festival de Films Sur La Danse in France, The Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, The Feldman Gallery + Project Space in Portland, de la Cruz Collection in Miami, and the Poznan Biennial in Poland. Kim’s short film Martiality, Not Fighting was awarded a Dioraphte Jury Award at Cinedans 2016 in Amsterdam, Best Performance Award at the Voarte – InShadow International Festival of Video, Performance and Technologies in 2014, and Best Short Film at Dance Camera West 2015 in Los Angeles. In the past Kim has been supported with grants and fellowships from EMPAC-Dance MOViE Commission, Jacob K. Javits Foundation, MacDowell Colony Fellowship, NEA/Dance USA, Meet the Composer, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Scottsdale Public Arts Fund, and the Illinois Arts Council.

> Submerge ((Marianne Kim 2017) is the latest screendance collaboration between choreographer Cheng-Chieh Yu and videographer Marianne Kim. A trio of refugee aliens is separated from one another in an unfamiliar place in search of each other and in search of escape. The protagonist, a duo-female persona, continually merges and splits as she seeks refuge from social alienation and displacement. Throughout they seek refuge in their mirroring and reflections. With their flight impulse, they keep moving in a way to identify themselves to one another. Their dancing is their shared foreign language. In adapting to this alien setting, they dress themselves in debris and trash. This constructed attire is made of ironic whites, a costume of functional fantasy, as in a faux nurse, or fairy. They are ephemeral but heavy and unkempt. The split screen allows the audience to see the trio together even as they seem apart. The physical landscape and the imagined landscape co-exist as they choreograph along the liminal edge. They are split between surviving in a foreign place and dreaming of finding each other in their watery home.

> Martiality, Not Fighting (Marianne Kim 2014) follows a young Chinese dancer performing the role of conscientious objector. He moves through the pedestrian and the abstract to deliberate the question “to fight or not to fight.” The choreography utilizes iconic images and gestures of martiality as well as combining postmodern dance and the martial arts culture of “Ba Gua Zhang.” With spiraling energy, everchanging spatial interplays and physical exchanges, the choreography deconstructs the external martial art expressions of fighting. At its cinematic core, Martiality Not Fighting implies forsaking violence in recognition of vital exchange and kinetic empathy.

Danièle Wilmouth [www.hairlessfilms.org] is fascinated by the unconscious choreography of everyday life, and cinema’s power to reveal the miraculous spectacle of the ordinary. She creates hybrid forms of film, video, installation and live art, which explore ritual, pattern, monotony, and impermanence. Her work investigates mediation of the choreographed body – constructing performances exclusively for the camera, as well as experimental approaches to social issue documentary. Wilmouth’s works have been shown on television, in film festivals and museums. A collection of her performance films was included in the 2016 BODY+ACT exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul. In 2013, she was featured in Dance Films Association’s ‘Meet the Artist’ series with a solo show at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Retrospectives of her work have been held in Russia (2004) and South Korea (2012). She teaches at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College.

> Remote Embodiment is a collaboration between filmmaker Danièle Wilmouth and fashion designer Anke Loh, featuring Cinematography by Sanghoon Lee, Choreography by Terence Marling and Music by Ryoji Ikeda. Remote Embodiment explores the medical and empathic potential of wearable technology, as strangers interact through the common language of dance, mechanical possession and the integrated circuit. The story follows Alice, a cyborg, as she encounters an array of different people on her path toward becoming human. The film features Chicago dancers Alice Klock, Jacqueline Burnett, and Emilie Leriche, with choreography by Terence Marling. The LED jewelry featured in Remote Embodiment was developed through a research collaboration between Anke Loh and Stretchable Circuits GbR and the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin, Germany.

> Curtain of Eyes (or まなざし）16mm black & white film directed by Danièle Wilmouth, featuring Cinematography by Ian Powell, Choreography by Katsura Kan, and Music by Adrian Freedman. Curtain of Eyes is an experimental film which combines Japanese Butoh dance with psychological imagery and choreographed cinematography. Over a six month period, director Danièle Wilmouth collaborated with the Butoh dancer Katsura Kan, and his dance company The Saltimbanques, to create movements for both dancers and camera. The result is an exploration of intimate relationships and bi-cultural identity. The British musician Adrian Freedman composed the original score for the film.

Michal Samama [www.michalsamama.com] works in the intersection of performance, dance, and the visual arts, moving between the theater, the gallery and the public space. She recently presented a solo show at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art in Israel. Her work was commissioned by The Chocolate Factory Theater in New York, Diver Festival, Intimal-Dance Festival and Curtain Up Festival in Tel-Aviv. In Chicago, she presented her work at Aspect Ratio, Defibrillator, Rapid Pulse, Julius Caesar, EXPO CHICAGO 2014, 6018 North, Sector 2337, Out of Site, Links Hall, among others. In New York her work was exhibited at New York Live Arts, Movement Research at Judson Church, Performance Mix Festival, Dixon Place, CPR, 92nd Y and more. Samama received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2015).

> Screensaver | Michal Samama says of this piece, “Working primarily in the medium of live-performance, I have a somewhat complicated relationship with the camera. Usually the camera serves to document my body at work. But such documentation, it seems, inescapably fails to capture the depth and liveliness of performance, flattening the image and objectifying the body. In “Screensaver”, I try to “work on our relationship”, by constructing and practicing a different sort of intimacy between my body and the camera. While the body here is excessively objectified, as an image in its abstract potential, it also emerges in its full realism and tangibility as its pores, sweat, hairiness and breath, come to the fore.”

Laura Corcuera [lcorcuera.tumblr.com] has a degree in Journalism from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and a master’s degree in Semiotics of mass communication. Press Officer at the National Museum of Natural Sciences (Spain) between 2005 and 2007, Corcuera founded the Periódico del MNCN, and also the science news agency SINC (FECYT), working as coordinator and chief editor from 2007 to 2010. Corcuera is a founder and member of the newspaper DIAGONAL, writing about science, sexual and gender diversity, LGBTQ movements, and performing arts. Corcuera has collaborated with the theater magazines Primer Acto and Artez, and with the international magazine Punto y Coma. Corcuera combines militant communication with feminist activism and performance and has studied with great teachers like Jango Edwars, Phillipe Gaulier, Eric de Bont, Esther Ferrer, Antonia Baehr and el Odin Teatret, and, La Pocha Nostra.

> Red Line was performed on May 27 2018, on the Chicago Transit Authority Red Line train by videographer: Brad Boonstra. Corcuera dances the entire length of the Red Line, crossing the city from north to south and activating the train car throughout the entire journey: 33 stops, one hour and fifteen minutes. Red Line is part of a body of performative research regarding “global cities” highlighting inequalities and precariousness in the beginning of 21st Century. Red Line is the first action of a project that Corcuera will develop in Chicago over the next few years, involving all CTA lines in the city (green, orange, pink, blue…) in order to rethink power relationships based on capitalism, sexism and racism.

NOBLE SQUARE | SAT 17 NOV

SITE/less [siteless.org] is a guerilla storefront located at 1250 W. Augusta Blvd., an edge site with ancillary relationships to a variety of urban crossroads and infrastructures. Positioned as an experimental architecture, movement, and research center, SITE/less seeks to rethink the relationship between the typical model of most performance venues and how the organization of those venues inevitably limits and conditions the curatorial practice. One focus of SITE/less is to develop a space that is, in itself, performative and to make use of an architectural approach that serves to stage a program of expressed activities while, at the same time, employing a structure that is open to unplanned social interactions and chance events. Video installations at SITE/less feature:

Zephyr [zephyrdance.com] | The Wall Dance [Premiere] is an excerpt of Kranicke’s 2012 durational work Allowances and Occurrences re-envisioned for the camera. Though Kranicke originally designed the work as an installation piece for performance at a gallery, allowing the audience to move about the space and choose their viewpoint, Zephyr re-lit the work and filmed it at SITE/less from multiple perspectives and proximities to more fully emphasize the deep, dramatic spatial qualities of tableaus reminiscent of Renaissance or Baroque master painting.
Meredith Monk [meredithmonk.org] | Short Silent Films (1966–94) | Iconic composer, singer, director/choreographer, and filmmaker, Monk originally incorporated these six unique and influential films into her live performance works and installations, including 16 Millimeter Earrings (1966) and Quarry (1976). They provide an example, and touchstone, for the films of the other contemporary artists’ work on view and an historic framework for movement artists’ depiction of the body in film.
Nadia Oussenko [nadiaoussenko.com] | On Falling is an exploration of falling and surrender. Oussenko and filmmaker Daniel Kullman experiment in a variety of public and private spaces, as well as an array of different surfaces and structures, discovering how to use movement, cinematography, outside stimulus, and costuming to examine feelings of abandonment, anxiety, and surrender. This dance for the camera also seeks to heighten the viewer’s visceral sensation through exploring the dynamic between voyeurism and the mover’s point-of-view.

EDGEWATER | FRI 30 NOV

Pivot Arts [pivotarts.org] produces and presents contemporary and multidisciplinary performance on Chicago’s far north side. We develop new work and present performances throughout the year culminating in a large-scale festival. Our vision is that of a vibrant community where collaborations between artists, businesses and organizations lead to the support and creation of unique performance events. Pivot Arts was formed in September 2012 as a pivot point, or central hub, that could connect innovative arts partners and programming. We support multidisciplinary artists through our arts incubator program and foster the creation of imaginative performance events. In addition to the Pivot Arts Festival, we host a Live Talk series that includes performances and discussions, we also create unusual, site-specific works throughout the year. Pivot Arts with In/Motion International Dance Film Festival presents the following screenings of short dance films:

A L L | Sarah C. Prinz + Danny Rosenberg + Amy Wilkinson | A L L is a dance film that features people living with Parkinson’s disease performing alongside their caretakers, professional dancers, and students. The development of movement through six weeks of improvisation and embodied storytelling, explores the idea of home. Dance performance is most often associated with the physical virtuosity of elite artist athletes, whereas dance therapy for those with neurological disorders like Parkinson’s, most typically happens in clinical settings rather than in the theater or onscreen. All attempts to broaden the kinds of voices represented in dance performance and the film demonstrates that community can be built across ages, races, and abilities through humor, vulnerability, and the joy of moving together. Directed by Sarah C. Prinz & Danny Rosenberg, produced by Amy Wilkinson, and Movement Coaching by Sarah Cullen Fuller.
SEPARATE SENTENCES | Austin Forbord + Amie Dowling | Incarceration is not a single or discrete event, but a dynamic process that unfolds over time and affects families for generations. Separate Sentence (2016) is a 15-minute dance/theater film that draws upon individual experiences and physical memories of a cast comprised of Bay Area artists – some of whom are fathers or sons who have experienced incarceration. The film was shot throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

> Amie Dowling creates dance and theater for the stage, for film and in community settings. For the past 17 years, her work has considered the politics and representation of mass incarceration. Well Contested Sites, a collaboration Austin Forbord and Bay Area artists, some of who were previously incarcerated, won the 2013 International Screendance film prize. Her work has been presented internationally at such venues as Busboys & Poets (Washington D.C.), Lincoln Center (NYC), Regards Hybrides (Canada), Cinéma Jean-Eustache (France), Passangen Art Gallery (Sweden), and the Juming Museum (Taiwan). Amie is an artist in residence in the San Francisco Jails and San Quentin Prison where she is a member of the Artistic Ensemble, http://www.aesq.info/. She is an Associate Professor in the Performing Arts Department at the University of San Francisco.

> Austin Forbord is a video artist, filmmaker, and choreographer. He has received numerous awards and honors for his work in each of these fields including an Emmy nomination and a Documentary of the Year award from the California Film Awards in 2013 for the documentary film Stage Left: A Story of Theater in San Francisco; an Isadora Duncun Award nomination for performance in 2001, visual design in 2003 and the award in 2006 for his design contribution to Deborah Slater’s House of Memoires; and the Jury prize at ADF’s 2013 International Screen Dance Festival for his short dance film Well Contested Sites. Austin has performed with a diverse group of San Francisco based companies including his own companies Rapt and AWD, as well as Scott Wells & Dancers, On-Site Dance Co, Kunst-Stoff and Sara Shelton Mann/Contraband. He has created media designs for performances by Opera Parallele, Asolo Rep, Joe Goode Performance Group, Robert Moses’ Kin, Sara Shelton Mann /Contraband, Stephen Pelton, Erling Wold, Liss Fain Dance, Kunst-Stoff and Motion-Lab. San Francisco Classical Voice described his video design for three of Opera Parallele’s shows as “some of the best I’ve seen anywhere for opera.” He is responsible for the critically acclaimed full-length documentary film, Artists in Exile: A Story of Modern Dance in San Francisco which was the Documentary of the Year at ADF’s 2000 International Screen Dance Festival. His film Stage Left: A Story of Theater in San Francisco commissioned by the Kenneth Rainin Foundation was featured at the 2011 Mill Valley Film Festival among many others and had its broadcast premiere on PBS.

Formidable Dreams | Sara Zalek + Eugene Sun Park | Formidable Dreams is a series of movement-based short films exploring the search for identity through the trickster hero, often out of time with the rest of the society, in between conscious and subconscious states, overstimulated and disillusioned, moving from memory to dream state. They question reality, authenticity, and the quest for inner truth that might be a shared experience. Through images, movement, and sound, the characters create a sense of bewilderment and curiosity as beings who continually seek to rediscover themselves.

> Sara Zalek [saratonin.com] is an artist, choreographer, and curator rooted in investigations of personal identity through cycles of struggle and triumph. She is obsessed with hybrids, time travel, experimental science, permaculture, and the intentional act of transformation. She has received numerous dance awards and residency opportunities including Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist in 2015 and a fellowship in 2017 at the Ragdale Foundation. Artististic director of Butoh Chicago, Zalek continues to connect national and international Butoh artists with Chicago art makers across genres of dance, music, film and performance art. Her mission is to foster positive communication and arts integration within Chicago’s complex, overlapping arts sectors by providing opportunities for workshops, conversations, and performances.

> Eugene Sun Park is a writer, director, and producer working in narrative and experimental forms. His films have screened at festivals, micro-cinemas, and on broadcast television, including Chicago Underground Film Festival, Athens International Film + Video Festival, Athens Digital Arts Festival (Athens, Greece), DC Asian Pacific American Film Festival, Korea Expat Film Festival (Seoul, Korea), Anthology Film Archives, Portland Art Museum, and on Time Warner Cable. Eugene’s feature-length script, Michael’s Story, was the winner of the Screenplay Competition at the 37th Asian American International Film Festival. He is a 2014 recipient of an Artist Project Grant from the Illinois Arts Council. Eugene’s latest producing project, a short narrative film about Japanese American WWII confinement, is supported by a JACS Grant from the US Department of the Interior, National Park Service.

INSAN | Tommy Pascal | In the context of a guerrilla war, complex relations of adversity are expressed through motion.

> Tommy Pascal [tommypascal.fr] ended his career as a dancer (Bejart Ballet Lausanne and Ballet Preljocaj) in 2007 to focus on filmmaking. mainly produced video recordings of dance and music performances, Pascal has also directed three documentary films: The making of Auguri – Olivier Dubois, Trans-Siberian Art Festival – Vadim Repin and History of Classical Russian Ballet – 2013 Dance Open.

PANEL DISCUSSION

Following the Pivot Arts screening, a panel discussion will include executive director of In/Motion, Amy Wilkinson, along with Diana Quiñones Rivera, AJ McClenon, and Sara Zalek. Moderated by Pivot Arts director Julieanne Ehre.

Amy M. Wilkinson [amywilkinsondance.com] is the Executive Director of In/Motion International Dance Film Festival. She has performed extensively with numerous Chicago companies including Luna Negra Dance Theatre, Same Planet Different World, CDI/Concert Dance Inc., and Thodos Dance Chicago for which she also choreographed and served as the Educational Outreach Director. Ms. Wilkinson’s choreographic work has been performed at national and international venues including the Ravinia Festival’s Rising Stars Series, The New Prague Dance Festival, Nanjing China Normal University, The Istanbul Festival of Music and Dance, and a performance with the International Choir and Orchestra of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Recent projects involved travel to Havana, Cuba and several collaborations with Mandala Dance Company in Rome, Italy. Ms. Wilkinson is on faculty in the Department of Fine and Performing Arts at Loyola University Chicago. She also makes dance films and is pursuing a PhD in Higher Education. In/Motion is currently soliciting submissions for 2019 juried screen dance shorts. Info found here and here.
AJ McClenon [ajmcclenon.com] was born and raised in Washington, D.C., where I learned to fish and wander. Humid summers spent between D.C., Baltimore and New York. Raised by southern grandparents, Nelba & Ernest and a D.C. native mom named Patricia Ann, aunts Cassie & Lalu and mom’s boyfriend Bill. I was able to build a relationship with my father, Reggie, during my adult life; his separation from us was partly due from PTSD and the prison industrial complex. Rhythmic echoes, raw morass between nail, skin. Stretching. Kin. TIght. My grandma waiting to catch the placenta. I was raised by four women and a grandfather who would sing and Bill who taught me how to handle the hooks between my fingers. Wet like scales scraped off on the cutting board on the counter beneath the kitchen window. Mom taught me how to divide the fish down the middle. We could take out the bones for broth and save the heads to feed the crabs. My grandpa told stories every year. They called this man a boy before he came home to pluck the birth from grandma’s nails. Grandma strong. Delivered babies. Made dinner for every night. Vegetable. Green. Vegetable. Yellow. Protein. Starch. Family stick together. We make split pea soup.
Diana Quiñones Rivera [vimeo.com/monseratipictures] started her filmmaking career in 2006, mentored by legendary filmmaker, the late Albert Maysles. One of her documentary films, It’s a Feeling, Dancing with Jeff Selby was screened at the Dance on Camera Film Festival at Lincoln Center in 2014 and at the Cinédanse Film Festival in Quebec in 2015. A current resident of Chicago, she completed a fellowship with Kartemquin Film’s Diverse Voices in Docs in 2016. The same year, Quiñones Rivera directed the music video for Zeshan B’s “Cryin’ In The Streets”. The video premiered in 2017 and was featured in Rolling Stone magazine, American Songwriter, Impose Magazine, and the Chicago Reader. In 2017, Quiñones Rivera screened the first episode of her new doc-series, Darling Shear, at the NewFest Film Festival in New York City, and the DuSable Museum of Chicago. She obtained a B.A. in Film and Literature at University of Puerto Rico and a Postgraduate Certificate in Filmmaking at London Film School.
Julieanne Ehre is the founder and the director of Pivot Arts. She both leads the organization and curates performances including the Pivot Arts Festival, Live Talk series, and oversees the “Celebrate Community!” Parade. She was the NEA/TCG New Generations “Future Leaders” Fellow at the Goodman Theatre where she served as producer on Latino Festival, New Stages Series and conceived of and produced the Goodman’s Artists Talk series. Julieanne served as a delegate to the Santiago a Mil Festival in Chile and the ITI World Theater Congress in Xiamen, China through Theater Communications Group and was the co-chair of the Arts and Culture Committee for Chicago’s 48th Ward. As the Artistic Director of Greasy Joan & Co. for five years, she won an “Abbey Award” from the Arts and Business Council for the organization’s strategic planning. At Greasy Joan, she directed and produced critically acclaimed and premiere adaptations of classic plays and worked as a freelance theater director. Ehre holds an MFA in Directing from Northwestern University and a BA in Anthropology from Grinnell College.

Image: Michal Samama | Screensaver | Video Still

Defibrillator is made possible with support from The Reva and David Logan Foundation; Apis Mellifera Fidelity Charitable Grant; Elizabeth Morse Genius Charitable Trust; Martha Strutters Farley and Donald C. Farley, Jr. Family Foundation; Zhou B Art Center; DFBRL8R Board of Directors; and generous contributions from our loving community.