Milka Djordjevich Comes to The Chocolate Factory Theater

The Chocolate Factory Theater (www.chocolatefactorytheater.org) concludes its Twelfth Anniversary season with the premiere of ANTHEM, a new performance by Milka Djordjevich, co-commissioned with Los Angeles Performance Practice. Tickets are $20 and may be purchased in advance at (212) 352-3101 or www.chocolatefactorytheater.org.

"Form generates power: power to rise above, power to hold ground. ANTHEM, a dance for four women by Milka Djordjevich, builds upon units of social and folk dance moves via a rubix cube-like spatial logic. Layers of repeated forms shift the bodies up gear. There is a new groove made here-a groove made by commitment and giving no-f-cks, a groove for women to ride rough, to represent, to feel themselves." - riting.org

Questioning contemporary dance's predisposition towards neutrality, authenticity and the de-sexualization of the female body, ANTHEM embraces theatricality, virtuosity and sass. The work weaves together existing and imagined vernacular dance styles to explore labor, play, and feminine-posturing. Four women execute a repetitive yet complex movement vocabulary that evolves as they rotate hypnotically within the confines of a square. Over time, the meditative rigor of their steps dissolves into a tangle of commotion, blurring the distinction between the mundane and the glamorous. Choreography by Milka Djordjevich. Performed by Laurel Atwell, Jessica Cook, Dorothy Dubrule and Devika Wickremesinghe. Music by Chris Peck. Lighting by Madeline Best. Costumes by Naomi Luppescu.

ANTHEM premiered October 2017 at the Los Angeles Exchange [LAX] Festival and is commissioned by the Chocolate Factory Theater and Los Angeles Performance Practice. ANTHEM was made possible in part by the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, a Pennington Dance Group SPACE GRANT @ ARC Pasadena and the Z. Clark Branson Foundation.

Milka Djordjevich is a choreographer whose work draws from a variety of compositional strategies to question preconceived notions of what dance should or should not be. Her work has been shown at many venues, including REDCAT, Grand Performances, Pieter, the Hammer Museum, Machine Project, Showbox LA/Bootleg Theater, and HomeLA in Los Angeles; the Kitchen, the Chocolate Factory Theater, the Whitney Museum, the American Realness Festival, and Danspace Project in New York; Counterpulse and the Berkeley Art Museum in Northern California; and internationally in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Macedonia, Poland, Serbia, and the UK. Djordjevich was a 2006-2007 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence and a 2008/2010 danceWEB Europe Scholar, and she is currently a 2017-2018 Princeton University Hodder Fellow. Her other projects include serving as guest editor for Movement Research's Critical Correspondence and initiating the Monday Morning Class series at Pieter.

Djordjevich has co-authored works with composer Chris Peck, choreographer Dragana Bulut, designer Samuel Yang, and artist Marcos Luytens. She has twice served as Visiting Assistant Professor in the UC Riverside Dance Department and has taught at UC Irvine, AMDA, Pomona College, Movement Research and PICA's TBA: 15 Festival. In 2016, Djordjevich established STANA, an organization cultivating local, national and international dance connections. www.thisismilka.com

Los Angeles Performance Practice is a non-profit organization devoted to the production and presentation of contemporary performance by artists whose work advances and challenges multi-disciplinary artistic practices. Our mission is to support a unique and diverse constellation of artists and audiences through the active creation and presentation of groundbreaking experiences that use innovative approaches to collaboration, technology and social engagement. Anchored in Los Angeles, our artists and projects have national and global reach. Across a range of platforms and partnerships, we build an active network of contemporary practitioners-curators and producers, artists and designers, audiences and patrons-all leveraged in service to the ideas and issues of our time.

The Chocolate Factory Theater exists to encourage and support artists in their process of inquiry. We engage specifically with a community of artists who challenge themselves and, in doing so, challenge us. We believe that by supporting the labor of these artists, we contribute to elevating New York City as a thriving marketplace 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 dialog. As such, we host artists as our equal partners with shared autonomy, trust and appreciation. While we seek to make big ideas and extended relationships possible, we commit to working at a small, intimate and personal scale, with few artistic compromises or boundaries. We achieve all of this by creating a vessel for artistic experimentation through a residency package serving the whole artist - salary, space, responsive and flexible support for the development of new work from inspiration to presentation.

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