1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
June 27, 2019
Dwellings is a collection of in-progress solos by choreographers Pepe Álvarez, Joanna Furnans, Anna Martine Whitehead, and Danielle Ross. Each of these works explore the body and the self in deep relationship to a myriad of other factors: to others, to the material landscape around us, to the past, and to audience. Curated by Danielle Ross as a collection, these works have an interesting potential to talk with and to illuminate one another. Ross is interested in the relationality of performance, and each of these artists deeply works with the body, the self, and the interior in relation to the multifaceted worlds it inhabits.
Pepe Álvarez
Land(e)scape
Land(e)scape is performance format I use to reactivate the performance codes I have found in my ongoing archival research of Puerto Rican experimental dance and performance art history; a personal archive I have collected obsessively over the past six years. As a queer decolonial act of myth-making it is also an attempt to place my body in relation to inanimate objects in order to bring back the immaterial substances of a collective, sensorial unconscious, always informed and contested by a long history of Puerto Rican anti-colonial struggles.
Pepe Álvarez is a Puerto Rican dance, theatre and performance artist that transform his obsession with obsolete dramatic structures into conceptual gestures and hybrid performance formats. For more information, please visit joseralvarezcolon.wixsite.
Image: This is NOT a piece by Viveca Vázquez by Pepe Álvarez, photo by Antonio Ramirez
Joanna Furnans
Doing Fine
Joanna Furnans is an independent dance artist based in Chicago. Her project, Doing Fine, is an evening-length solo performance resulting from a year of autobiographical writing and movement research developed in collaboration with five choreographers, a writer, a visual artist, and a sound designer. The creative research specifically explores themes of memory, specificity, vulnerability, habit, confusion, recovery, and commonplace. Doing Fine will premiere in Chicago in August 2019 at the artist’s studio, the grey space, with a site-specific installation and the compilation of the project’s selected writings. For more information, please visit joannafurnans.com.
Doing Fine is supported by the Illinois Arts Council Agency, The Yard, High Concept Labs, and a 2018 Chicago Dancemaker’s Forum Lab Artist Award.
Image: photo by Christine Wallers
Anna Martine Whitehead
Untitled
Continuing her exploration of architecture, improvisation, collectivity, and containment, Martine presents this funky little piece as an opportunity to share some practice. Generally speaking, Martine makes performances. She has been presented by venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; San José Museum of Art; Velocity Dance Center; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; Chicago Cultural Center; Links Hall; AUNTS; and CounterPULSE. She has developed her craft by working in close collaboration with Onye Ozuzu, Jefferson Pinder, taisha paggett, Every house has a door, Keith Hennessy, BodyCartography Project, Julien Prévieux, and the Prison + Neighborhood Art Project, among others. For more information, please visit annamartine.com.
Image: photo by Sara Pooley
Danielle Ross
You Are Not Alone
Danielle Ross is a performance maker, curator, dancer, and scholar. She is on the board of the Creative Music Guild, co-curated the series Pure Surface and is co-founder of FRONT, a newspaper dedicated to dance and performance. She has worked with Linda Austin, Ayako Kato, Bouchra Ouizguen, Zoe|Juniper, Lu Yim, and others. Ross is a graduate student in Northwestern’s Performance Studies program. For more information, please visit daniellerossperformance.com.
You Are Not Alone is a meditation on how our bodies soak up those we move with; it explores the performing body as a collector. An experiment in the visual, voyeuristic elements of performance, it plays with how our relationships - you and I, you and you - are entangled in performance.
Image: Apparatus by Danielle Ross, photo by Chelsea Petrakis