Performa/Dance Will Perform PIVOT This August

In its 10th season, Performa/Dance will present a stacked quadruple bill: the world premiere of FINDING ALICE (IN WONDERLAND), a whimsical, meta take on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, rising NYC-based choreographer Christian Warner’s WHITE HOT ROOM, and new works by award-winning Austin favorites BLiPSWiTCH and Alexa Capareda.

Performa/Dance Artistic Director Jennifer Hart’s FINDING ALICE (IN WONDERLAND) takes a meta view of the creative process, using Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the ultimate classic on the power of imagination, to explore identity and meaning in artmaking. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a curiouser and curiouser tale, has brought joy to audiences since its publishing more than 150 years ago. At its heart, it is a nonsensical and surreal story, reflecting on the idea of selfhood, rules, and logic, while boldly satirizing authority. 

As creative people, artists often question their own voice and process, how their work is perceived, and “the meaning of it all.” In FINDING ALICE (IN WONDERLAND), we fall down the rabbit hole of self-reflection and art, entering a topsy-turvy world of play that allows us to explore an alternate world, one that can illuminate the complexities and eccentricities of artistic life. To develop the work, Hart has paired with costume designer and experimental artmaker Kelsey Oliver, using music by Yann Tiersen as well as new compositions by Austin-based multi-media composer Ritika Bhattacharjee.

Performa/Dance is also pleased to present a soaring new talent, New York City-based Christian Warner, a multidisciplinary performing artist and choreographer whose career spans concert and commercial dance, musical theatre, and film. Warner’s work, WHITE HOT ROOM, first premiered in 2019 in Minneapolis and traveled to New York for a six-month residency at Triskelion Arts. Drawing inspiration from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, WHITE HOT ROOM, with choreography and sound design by Warner, captures a man’s self-reflection on events of loss, the violence of consciousness, recovery, and reframing narratives of long held trauma.

As part of PIVOT, Performa/Dance welcomes BLiPSWiTCH, “one of the most innovative dance companies ever to move through Austin’s performative spaces” (Austin Chronicle). Celebrated for their site-specific work, BLiPSWiTCH has made dances in concrete warehouses, bike shops, historic homes and big grassy fields, on merry-go-rounds, wooden plank platforms, water-filled troughs and storage scaffolding, amplifying the complexity of location. With HYPERBATON, super-power dancers Carissa Topham Fisher, Taryn Lavery, Katie Lowen, Alex Miller, and Lisa Schreck leave the shoes and knee pads at the door, embracing the infrastructure of a space built for dance performance with pink lemonade color and energy, heightened by a dynamically sweeping composition from Michael Brown and Brett Marcom. Movement is arranged, rearranged, repeated, reversed, and reinserted for emphasis.

Austin dance favorite Alexa Capareda creates her first live work for Performa/Dance, a pas de deux titled CAUTERY. The work depicts the visceral urge to remove, burn off, or destroy undesired parts of oneself, representing the human struggle to be free of that which causes pain. Ballet Austin dancers, rising stars Alyssa Manguiat and Arnaldo Hernandez, grace the stage for this riveting duet.

PIVOT will be held at Ballet Austin’s downtown AustinVentures StudioTheater, August 16th at 7:30pm, and August 17th at 4:30pm and 7:30pm. The performance runs 75 minutes, with a 15-minute intermission. This production is supported in part by the City of Austin’s Elevate Grant Program. 

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