The Southern Theater Presents SCUBA Touring Network 4/23, 4/24

The SCUBA Touring Network is the Southern Theater, ODC in San Francisco, Velocity Dance Center in Seattle and Philadelphia Dance Projects, working together to bring the freshest names in contemporary dance to new markets. Now in its eighth year, SCUBA gives Minneapolis audiences the chance to see some of the most innovative new work on the national dance scene during the course of one evening. SCUBA provides precious touring opportunities for dance artists and for everyone else it gives a fantastic view of "the breadth of choreographic invention across the country" (Star Tribune).

SCUBA Touring Network 2010 includes Megan Mazarick from Philadelphia, locust from Seattle (directed by Amy O'Neal and featuring local dancer Ellie Sandstrom), and Otto Ramstad and Olive Bieringa's BodyCartography Project from Minneapolis.

Performances are April 23 & 24, 2010, Friday & Saturday at 8pm. An opening night pre-show reception will be held at 7pm, sponsored by City Pages. Tickets are $18. For tickets call the Southern Theater box office at 612.340.1725 or visit www.southerntheater.org.

The Southern Theater is located at 1420 Washington Ave. S. in Minneapolis, MN 55454.

Company-submitted program information:

From Minneapolis - The BodyCartography Project
Symptom

Symptom examines the human body as both an object of study and as a producer of knowledge, investigating notions of social bodies versus biological bodies, communication and the gaps between seeing, knowing and empathy. Symptom explores the slippage between subjective and objective understandings of the human body, where a symptom acts as an indicator, trait, feature, mark or sign that is open for interpretation.

"The pleasure of viewing is so intense here, so fun as to be nearly guilty...what you see is at once brilliantly planned - lighting, angles, perspectives clear as cinema - and breakneck. The movement feels dangerously unhinged." - Mpls.St.Paul Magazine

From Philadelphia - Megan Mazarick
Avatard

Avatard combines Mazarick's adolescent love of fantasy and science fiction with her current passion for creating inventive movement vocabularies. The dance follows a whimsical story line and the B-grade science fiction of the fifties is a part of the overall feel. Video projections on see-through screens act as a low-fi set design and the sound score is created from popular science fiction theme songs and video game soundtracks. The campy and absurd narrative is humorous, but also allows the movement to become the focal point of a multi-layered work.

For the excerpt version of this work, we follow the plight of the two sci-fi video vixens, Soul Burner and Tetris, as they are manipulated and controlled by unseen video game-dork forces. The role of women within science fiction media helped shape these two characters, who are part laser gun-toting-alien-blasting warriors and part sensual stereotyped Barbarellas. The duet was originally titled Ursula after Ursula LeGuin.

"engagingly artful and provocative... refreshingly original movement language" - Philadelphia City Paper

cuttlefish

Thought to be the most intelligent of invertebrates, the cuttlefish is known for its amazing ability to change the color, pattern, and texture of its skin as defensive camouflage. The study of these characteristics became a metaphor to Mazrick for the shape shifting of humans. She dissected her own defensive mechanisms to create movement states that were derivative of the different personalities existing within one body. She bounced between a literal exploration of the cuttlefish and a figurative one with movement based on the reaching elegance of tentacles and the quirky quick shifts in posture and weight as a woman desperately seeks approval via transformation.

"This is one tough and fierce performer... it's a thrill to watch her." - voiceofdance.org

From Seattle - locust
crushed (excerpt)

crushed is a dance/music/video performance work on being blindsided. crushed looks at how it feels to be caught off guard and how often times the entity doing the blindsiding can be more affected than the blindsided entity. Choreographer Amy O'Neal and composer Zeke Keeble continue to combine forces in this feverishly physical dissection of cause and effect.

"crushed was breathtakingly brilliant. Its intensely physical movement left me at a loss for words, but I left the theater convinced that I had witnessed a profoundly accurate representation of the overwhelming pressures of contemporary life." - Artdish

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