Lizz Roman & Dancers Presents Site Specific Journey Through An Ocean Beach Home

In a home near San Francisco's Ocean Beach on three weekends from September 6 To 22 the award winning Lizz Roman & Dancers inhabit a two story dwelling with a new site specific journey, engaging the architecture with performance, music and film.

Revealing, engaging and immersive, Roman's newest project "Sunset Dances II" draws audiences into an intimate experience. The living paths of this home become in multiple simultaneous performances, an active breathing "happening" experience with viewers in each location traveling throughout the performance environment.

"Sunset Dances II" features choreography by Lizz Roman with dancers Chris Black, Colin Epstein, Clarissa Ko, Jenny McAllister, Gizeh Muniz, Jamie Nakama, Becky Robinson-Leviton and Sonya Smith. The production includes academy award winning filmmaker Pete Litwinowicz and award winning lighting designer Clyde Sheets, musician/composer Jerome Lindner and new percussionist Malcolm Lee and vocalist Tamsin Black performing an original live score.

"The dances I make are emotional explorations of human interactions set in buildings.." Lizz remarks. "As we create a dance, I often feel like the dance becomes a long embrace between my dancers and the building, watching them dance with each other through the walls, doors, stairs, and hallways is both soothing and exhilarating.The dance is the sum of the journey we take through the space."

Lizz Roman's unique choreographic style has established her as one of California's leading site choreographers.This sequel to her award winning SUNSET DANCES: Architectural Meditations II (2017) is performed in multiple locations with viewers at each location migrating throughout the home performance environment. With "Sunset Dances II" Lizz Roman & Dancers engage space and time in a deeply immersive site experience, simultaneously from 3 different perspectives. Using windows, doorways, stairs, walls and furniture to frame their architectural story, performers and audience move together between the indoor and outdoor sites.Viewers peer inside and outside windows, doorways, down stairwells and enter into rooms with dancers, musicians and films as the dance moves from room to room, from up to down, from outside to inside, watching one dance from varying perspectives.

Lizz Roman, Artistic Director of LIZZ ROMAN & DANCERS (LR&D) has been a dancer and choreographer in San Francisco since 1984. "The dance is the sum of the journey we take through a site," states Roman. "In the words of LeCorbusier, 'To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects.' I seek guidance from each building I collaborate with," continues Roman. "I create a visual history of our physical journey through that space that becomes a dance. It is driven mainly by the architecture of the space."

Roman and her company have been making dances in San Francisco's dance spaces, local theaters, and outdoor festivals since 1995. The work has been described by critics as "Eloquent", "Breathtaking", "Provocative", and "Captivating." LR&D are best known for their trademark expansive dances that spring, roll, and fly through buildings, resulting in an Isasdora Duncan Dance Award (IZZIE) for outstanding choreography in 2017 SUNSET DANCES: Architectural Meditations and

2013 for "DEEPER: Architectural Meditation at CounterPulse" (2012), and a IZZIE nomination for Best Company Performance for CELLGROUND (2005). The company has developed innovative site-specific techniques to work in unique and commonplace locations with a variety of multi-media collaborators and scenic elements. WaterSaw, Roman's most recent music collaborators received an IZZIE Award for Original Music score for 2012's "DEEPER." The SF Butoh Festival and Yerba Buena Gardens Festival commissioned Roman to create a site-specific dance, which premiered at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2005, and was remounted again for the 2006 festival season. In 1998, Roman and filmmaker Kevin Cunningham received the SF WEEKLY Black Box Award for Cross-Genre Performance for "IN HER DREAMS."

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