CALL AND RESPONSE by Jess Pretty to be Presented at The Chocolate Factory Theater

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The Chocolate Factory Theater concludes its Spring 2024 season with the premiere of call and response, a new dance performance by jess pretty.

“There's a conversation that only the people in this room can have…find it” - Adrienne Maree Brown

In call and response, jess pretty wraps her audience in a conceptual, and literal, embrace. Unfolding as a dance-based, experiential conversation - between pretty and her younger selves, her ancestors, and everybody else in the room - call and response is a kind of casual, yet devotional, soirèe or salon or kickback, with pretty as the host.

Within an environment of familiar (and familial) comforts - living room furniture, record player, books and plants; all of it bathed in continuous, deep blue light - call and response doles out laughter and music as soft (and generous) launching points for an experience of memory and reflection that is shared and felt as much as it is witnessed. It endeavors to slow down the room; and invites us to join in the attempt.

Choreographer / Performer: jess pretty. Creative Interlocutors: keyon gaskin & Niall Jones. Lighting Design / Tech Support / Set Design: Maggie Heath. DJ / Sound Practitioner: Tyler Hughley / DJ Luccihugh. Sound Consultant: Jeremy Touissaint-Baptiste.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

jess pretty received an MFA in Dance with a minor in Queer Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. she has shown her work at La Mama Experimental Theater Club (2017 La Mama Moves Festival), New York Live Arts (as a 2016/17 Fresh Tracks artist), CATCH!, Gibney Dance Center, Brooklyn Studios for Dance, the CURRENT SESSIONS, panoply performing arts space, Green Street Studios, three ACDA conferences, and the Chocolate Factory Theatre. pretty has been an artist in residence at Kent State (2017), the Chocolate Factory Theatre, and the Center for Performance Research (2019-2020) and was also a 2020 member of the Queer Art Fellowship. pretty has collaborated and been a part of the works of: Will Rawls, Claudia Rankine, Kevin Beasley, Okwui Okpokwasili, Peter Born, Catherine Gallasso, David Thomson, Katie Workum, Niall Jones, Jennifer Monson, Cynthia Oliver, Leslie Cuyjet and Dianne McIntyre. pretty is currently the Creative Director of AUNTS. 

pretty recently relocated to Minneapolis, MN where she is an Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.

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