Works
TACTILE
Footloose presents AIM: Artists in Motion at Spring Fall Studio in West Berkeley's Sawtooth Building. Christine Germain of STEM with guest artist from Switzerland, Brigitta Schrepfer; Janet Collard with musician, Terran Olson; plus duet Garth Grimball and Heather Stockton of Wax Poet(s) perform in their own original, dance theater works.
Christine Germain uses touch on a daily basis to teach and communicate and is passionate about this new collaboration and research about the first sense. Brigitta Schrepfer loves dance as a language full of vividness! The two met in Switzerland and are now in residence with Berkeley Rep and Footloose to create a performance experience that invites the audience to reflect, communicate and explore their relationship to touch.
LEVYdance hosts a recurring micro-residency, LEVYsalon, that provides multidisciplinary artists with 10 hours each of free rehearsal space to work, create, explore & develop ideas and themes. Each group performs 5 minutes of their work-in-progress at the culminating showcase.
Saturday evening features a DJ'd dance party w/ DJ Mikah D. Sunday's matinee includes a Q&A session with the artists after the show.
Corps Étranger II
Choreography by: Christine Germain in collaboration with Diana Lara and Joyce Lu
Music by: Gretchen Jude
http://gretchenjude.weebly.com/
Is it a mirage, or a mirror of our perceptions? There are abstract shapes transforming before us, which may seem extra-human but are still living things. Ever so slowly, they move to the sounds of their breath, our breath and the electric noise of the nervous system. The body’s strange and evocative plasticity invites us to reconceive our own physicality as if a metaphor for evolution. The meticulous movement aesthetic draws from the study and practice of Contact Improvisation, phenomenology, and somatics such as the Feldenkrais Method. The latter inspires an exploration of Darwin’s stages of evolution, and how we are all creatures of habit adapting to new environments, leaving behind past identities to embrace new ones. How can we get on with our lives once we have faced the alien in ourselves?
Photosoma
Award-winning choreographer Christine Germain joins forces with lighting designer Heather Basarab to explore a range of lighting design on a single piece of work. In Photosoma, dancers Ronja Ver, Joyce Lu, and Diana Lara will repeat the same choreography to different lighting designs in a study of the effect of technical elements on the perception of movement. The audience will see the same piece several times and observe the extent to which lighting influences perception of the artwork, the body, and the environment.
Remembering and Remembering Again
Remembering and Remembering Again are a series of works in response to the world’s worst industrial tragedy: The Bhopal disaster. I wanted to raise awareness to the fact that 30 years later, people in India are still waiting for Dow Chemical to clean the site of the toxic spill. The deeper we got into the creative process, however, the more I saw images of so many other tragedies that are happening all around the world. Perhaps this work is now more of a portrait of the universality of injury that comes of irresponsible modern capitalism and a question about how we can find better ways to support each other. It is my hope that Remembering Again inspires others to build and rehearse better relationships with each other and our environment in order to construct a better world to live in.
LAB Étude no. 2
Choreography by: Christine Germain in collaboration with Joyce Lu
Two Dancers/Feldenkrais practitioners structure contact improvisations that explore both experiential and virtual anatomy. We sense and express each others’ stories; the body becomes a landscape from which we excavate information and share what we read and learn from this experience.
Transmutation
Transmutation by Christine Germain in collaboration with Andrea del Moral and Deirdre Morris, questions how, as individuals, do we deal with our identity shifts? It investigates the learning or relearning of who we are, and our relationships with others, space, and the world as we embrace, reject, or simply accept this new alien identity.
Le Projet Migration
Choreography by: Christine Germain in collaboration with Slater Penney
Love. Immigration. Bureaucracy. "Le Projet Migration" is a piece of physical poetry that is touching, humorous, evocative, and autobiographical. The work exists largely to instigate discussions, questioning laws on marriage, immigration, residency, and citizenship. The experimental movement vocabulary hybridizes contact improvisation, partner balancing, and contemporary dance with the intimacy of everyday gestures.
The Cloud Factory
This piece investigates the candid perspective of children who are questioning adult’s conscious or non-conscious choices regarding environmental issues, and abuse of power. Going from observing the clouds in their multiple creative forms to the disillusion of a not-so-perfect world.
Photo by: Warren Charles Jones
Writhing Letters
A site-specific contemporary dance performance about illiteracy.
Photo by: Luiza Silva
