Free and open to the public!

Clinard Dance and Cultura Pilsen will present an excerpt of Everyday People/Everyday Action based on photos of the Pilsen neighborhood by Akito Tsuda on Thursday, April 5th at the Regenstein Library at University of Chicago at 6:00pm with a talkback with Tsuda, Clinard and Cultura Pilsen to follow at 7:00pm.

How many times does a bus driver turn their steering wheel from one end of hercroute to the other? How many glasses does a bartender wash? How many city streetscdoes a bike messenger cover? These and a thousand other everyday repetitive actions are the inspiration for a new interdisciplinary work. The rhythm of Tsuda's photos and the people in them going through everyday repetitive actions is the percussive fuel for this performance.

 

The work incorporates influences from Gypsy jazz, klezmer, flamenco and classical Spanish as they seek to tell a story about everyday people doing everyday actions; actions that celebrate, articulate, and magnify the understated beauty of the ordinary. 

 

Through this story we hope to wake each other up to our shared humanity and offer new considerations about our very beautiful, very ordinary and very typical neighborhoods and worlds. A story about ordinary beauty can ventilate our humanness in contrast to the stories in mainstream media which are saturated with speed, big ideas, big promises, panic and fear language. Art can rally us, it can

encourage, it can create considerations about what it is we are all enmeshed in.