Ursula Eagly's DREAM BODY BODY BUILDING At The Chocolate Factory Theater

Ursula Eagly returns to The Chocolate Factory Theater with a new evening dance + social experiment: Dream Body Body Building.

Dream Body Body Building choreographs lucid dreamwork and other territories where the unconscious touches the conscious, sculpting the imagined and felt experiences of performers and audience as a site for collective transmission.

In Dream Body Body Building, performers and audience members form intimate spatial constellations, arranged to amplify the possibility for individual and collective exchange. Within an immersive soundscape of field recordings and composed sounds, performed live by the Bucharest-based sound artist Lala Misosniky, performers (using techniques derived from drumming journey practices and Carl Jung's active imagination meditations) enter waking dream states, conjuring vividly imagined landscapes which are then made visible on stage - via individual and group exchanges between performers and audience members - through movement, sound, and language, all carefully crafted to create positive biofeedback in the audiences' bodies. It's a surprising, nuanced, and highly calibrated sensory adventure.

Dream Body Body Building is created in collaboration with performers Laurel Atwell, Madeline Best, Justin Cabrillos, and Takemi Kitamura. Lighting is by Madeline Best in collaboration with Shana Crawford. Sound by Lala Misosniky. Set Design by Laurel Atwell.

Tickets may be purchased in advance at www.chocolatefactorytheater.org.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Ursula Eagly is a dance artist based in New York City. Her works consider physical experiences that are not conventionally regarded as material for choreography. Ursula has received commissions and presentations by The Chocolate Factory Theater, Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, Dance New Amsterdam, Mount Tremper Arts, Movement Research at the Judson Church, the New Museum for Contemporary Art, Aunts, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center, P.S. 122, CATCH, The Old American Can Factory, and Ur (New York); Laboratorio Arte Alameda (Mexico City); Albania Dance Meeting (Durres, Albania); NOT FESTIVAL (Copenhagen); Solo in Azione (Milan); Wherever Whenever Festival (Tokyo); Dramski Theatre, Locomotion Festival, and Makedonska Filharmonija (Skopje, Macedonia); and re:PLAY (Imphal, Manipur).

Her work has been honored with grants from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation's USArtists International program, DTW's Suitcase Fund, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts' Emergency Grant Program, the Japan Foundation's Performing Arts JAPAN Program, the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, and the Queens Council on the Arts. Ursula has sustained multi-year collaborations with the Tulum-based artist Martín Lanz Landazuri, the Kamakura-based composer Kohji Setoh, and the Skopje-based choreographer Iskra Sukarova. As a dancer, she has worked with Kathy Westwater (2006-2010) and Yoshiko Chuma (2006-2011), as well as Laurel Atwell, Rebecca Brooks, Rebecca Davis, Daria Faïn, Julie Mayo, Maho Ogawa, and Christopher Williams.

Ursula investigates performance through writing. She has edited 53rd State Press Dance Pamphlet (inaugural edition) Movement Research Performance Journal (Editor-in-Chief, issues 41 and 42, Critical Correspondence (2010—2011), Danspace Project's e-book series and catalogues PLATFORM 2010: Back to New York City and PLATFORM 2011: Body Madness, and Arts International's performing arts magazine. As a writer, she has contributed to magazines from Artforum to ARTnews and is a frequent presence in the Movement Research Performance Journal.

ABOUT THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY THEATER

The Chocolate Factory Theater is an artist-centered organization, built by and for artists.  Co-founders Sheila Lewandowski and Brian Rogers began making work together in 1995 and quickly saw the need for a creative home to support their work and the work of fellow experimental performance-based artists.  The Chocolate Factory therefore has grown and developed within and through a creative process that centers the development of new work, as guided by makers.

The Chocolate Factory Theater exists to encourage and support performing artists in their process of inquiry. We engage with a community of artists who challenge themselves and, in doing so, challenge us. We believe that by supporting the labor of artists and the public presentation of their work, we contribute to elevating New York City as a thriving and more equitable wellspring of ideas.

The Chocolate Factory embraces artistic practice as an integral part of the artist's whole life, an essential component of the life of our community and a key element of a larger national and international artistic dialogue. As such, we host artists as our equal partners with shared autonomy, trust and appreciation.

Since its founding in 2004, The Chocolate Factory Theater has supported the development and presentation of new work by a community of local, national and International Artists working in dance, theater, performance, and related practices. 

The Chocolate Factory Theater continues its pioneering commitment to addressing labor conditions within the independent performing arts community by paying all lead artists, performers, designers and technicians a fair hourly wage, on the books, for all rehearsal and production hours within our spaces.

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