Liss Fain Dance Premieres THE IMPERFECT IS OUR PARADISE This Weekend

In the world premiere of The Imperfect is Our Paradise, choreographer Liss Fain creates a new environmental work with longtime collaboratorsMatthew Antaky, set design; Mary Domenico, costume design; Dan Wool, sound design; andFrédéric Boulay, projection design. Using spoken text from Faulkner's 1929 masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury, the company explores the technique of stream of consciousness as a source of inspiration. The Imperfect is Our Paradise runs this weekend, September 11-14, 2014 at ODC Theater in San Francisco.

"In The Sound and the Fury, the language moves like a river with strong and gentle currents, eddies, whirlpools," says Fain. "The past and present intermingle sometimes without any punctuation. Sentences and fragments often have no real beginning or end. And the experience of reading leaves me feeling like I am in the mind of the character, experiencing the rawness, relentlessness of his emotions."

For a number of years Fain has turned to works of literature for inspiration. This year's After the Light made striking use of Virginia Woolf's The Waves; The Water is Clear and Still (2012) borrowed from Jamaica Kincaid's At the Bottom of the River; The False and True are One (2010) vocalized passages from stories by Lydia Davis. In each case the text's imagery, cadence, its sense of place and emotional trajectory help to inform Fain's vision, but never in a literal or reductive way.

Fain holds true to the desire to create an experience not unlike getting lost in a good if challenging book, an aesthetic choice reinforced by her decision to draw audiences up close to the performers in a gallery setting. For The Imperfect is Our Paradise Fain and Antaky plan to transform ODC Theater into a space where the audience can circumambulate the performance on all sides.

Joining Liss Fain Dance this fall are Gregory DeSantis and Aidan DeYoung. Returning company dancers include Jeremiah Crank, Katharine Hawthorne, Megan Kurashige, Shannon Kurashigeand Carson Stein.

Tickets are $30 in advance, $35 at the door and $15 for students and seniors. To purchase, call the ODC Theater box office at 415-863-9834, Monday through Friday from 12 - 3pm. Or online visit odcdance.org/buytickets.php.

ABOUT LISS FAIN DANCE
Liss Fain Dance (LFD) tours nationally and internationally with work for proscenium stages and performance installations. The company has performed and taught at festivals and venues in Poland, Germany, Belarus, Russia and the UK, as well as colleges, universities, festivals and presenting organizations in the US. In addition, LFD performs in free outreach events throughout the Bay Area.

LFD has collaborated with numerous composers, lighting and set designers, videographers, actors and technologists. In recent years the company has focused its energy in creating performance installations that bring the audience inside the set and close to the performers. Non-narrative, highly structured and emotionally resonant, her work fuses modern dance's forceful energy with the kinetic precision of ballet. Since its founding in Boston in 1988, LFD has premiered over 45 works by Fain and collaborated with individuals and creative organizations that include MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies, The Exploratorium and The Apple Multimedia Lab.

LFD was one of four US companies invited to perform at Internationale Tanzmesse NRW. The company's site-specific work has been sponsored by Amerika Haus for a performance installation at the prestigious Beck & Eggeling Gallery in Dusseldorf, Germany; The Brower Center, Berkeley, CA; Theater Artaud, San Francisco, CA; and Mobius Theater, Boston, MA. In addition to these venues, the company has performed at and been presented by, among others: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Z Space, Powerhouse Arena, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Mill Valley Library, West Wave Dance Festival, ODC Theater, Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, Open Look Contemporary Dance Festival in Russia, Silesian Dance Festival, Zawirowania Festival, the US Embassy, Contemporary Dance Forum in Poland, Belaya Vezha International Theater Festival, Minsk Philharmonic Society and Grodno Drama Theater in Belarus, California State Summer School of the Arts, International Computer Music Conference, Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, Downtown Dance Festival, NYC, Dance Umbrella Boston, Harvard University, University of Massachusetts, Colby College, Clark University and the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT.

In addition to its busy performance schedule, LFD conducts an outreach and education program to provide opportunities for middle and high school students from a broad spectrum of communities to combine dance and movement with creative writing. By working with Fain and company members, students expand their creativity, imagination, and ability to communicate and interpret both abstract and concrete ideas through movement and writing.

ABOUT MATTHEW ANTAKY
Since 1985, Antaky has created and collaborated on both scenic and lighting designs for all of the performing arts including theater, opera, dance and music. His work has been seen throughout the United States and in many countries around the world. For opera and music, Antaky has designed multiple productions for Utah Opera and Symphony, Opera Pacific, Ensemble Parallèle, Festival Opera, Oakland Symphony, Dallas Symphony, Opera San Jose, The Cabrillo Music Festival and the San Francisco World Music Festival. His extensive designs in the world of dance include several works for Liss Fain Dance, as well as ODC/Dance, Oklahoma City Ballet, Li Chiao Ping, Smuin Ballet, Robert Moses Kin, Mark Foehringer Dance Project/SF, The National Ballet of Peru, La Tania Flamenco, Lily Cai Dance Company, SjDanceCo, Chitresh Das Dance Company and Flyaway Productions among many others. Antaky is a seven-time nominee and four-time recipient of the Isadora Duncan award for outstanding visual design.

ABOUT MARY DOMENICO
Domenico applies her Apparel Design degree from The Rhode Island School of Design to various forms of art and theater. She has designed costumes for over 75 fully staged theatrical, operatic and dance performances throughout the Bay Area. She has collaborated with Margaret Jenkins Dance, Robert Moses' Kin, Diablo Ballet, ODC's choreographers Brenda Way, KT Nelson and Kimi Okada, the Oakland Raiderettes choreographer Karen Kovac, Raw Dance, and Shared Space's Todd Eckert. Her costumes have been featured in many local publications and have toured the US and Europe on many occasions. Domenico also works as a freelance stylist for commercial and fine art photography. Her most recent collaboration with RJ Muna won first place in the Fashion category of the 2010 APA National Photo Competition and another image was selected to appear in the Graphis publication "100 Best in Photography 2011." Domenico's work has been featured on the cover of the New York Times Business Day as well as multiple San Francisco publications.

ABOUT DAN WOOL
Originally from St. Louis, Missouri, Dan Wool is a San Francisco-based composer who has worked in New York, Los Angeles, London and Mexico City creating scores for more than 45 feature film and broadcast television projects, including seven films for celebrated cult filmmaker Alex Cox (Repo Man, Sid & Nancy). He is perhaps best known as the principal composer in the soundtrack-group Pray for Rain. Wool has worked extensively in creating sound and music for international and domestic advertising and also as sound designer for short films and documentaries, including several for the BBC and Channel 4 (UK). As a music producer and engineer, Wool has collaborated with international artists such as Bernie Worrell (Parliament-Funkadelic); Philip Chevron and James Fearnley (The Pogues); Debra Harry (Blondie); and many Bay Area artists, including All My Pretty Ones, Essence, The Mermen, and Kally Price. Wool has been commissioned to create scores and sound design compositions for The Architecture + Design Museum (L.A.), AXIS Dance Company, Liss Fain Dance, RAWdance, choreographer Sonsherée Giles, and The Tea Dancers/Ballet de la Compasión. He has also worked as a sound engineer and designer on dance compositions with composer Beth Custer (Joe Goode and Jo Kreiter), composer Rob Reich (Circus Bella, Gaucho, Tin Hat). In October of 2010 Wool performed in composer Jem Finer's "Longplayer" installation, sponsored by the Longnow Foundation at YBCA. In 2013 Wool's score for AXIS Dance Company's Full of Words was nominated for an Isadora Duncan Dance Award for outstanding achievement in music and sound.

ABOUT FRÉDÉRIC BOULAY
Over the past 25 years, Boulay has held various positions such as Video and Projection Designer, Director of Production, Production Manager and Technical Director for over 300 productions. His capacity to lead and manage time-sensitive projects and multi-disciplinary teams has facilitated many cutting-edge multimedia projects and world premieres. Boulay has also been the resident Director of Production for Ensemble Parallèle and Festival Opera for many years. A native of France, Boulay holds both a Masters in Theater Design and Production and an Executive MBA. His company, Oaktown Productions, has provided design, management, production and construction services for performing arts organizations since 2005.

Photo Credit: RJ Muna

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