NOTE: This event has been postponed until further notice
In its first engagement at the Art Institute of Chicago and the main event of its 18th Season, The Seldoms perform the Chicago premiere of Floe, a dance theater work about climate change. The engagement opens on the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day, and runs Wednesday, April 22 through Saturday, April 25 for four evening performances starting at 7pm. The performance takes place in the Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room.
Floe, a 75-minute dance theater work is about warming oceans, the vanishing of Arctic ice, oil extraction, and madness and delusion. The artists navigate this complex topic by weaving together multiple references to modern delusions: the theories of flat earth conspirators, contemporary climate change denialists, and the ill-fated whalers of Hermann Melville’s Moby Dick. They draw a link between the 19th c. whaling and the modern-day fossil fuel industries, both unsustainable exploitations of natural resources. The performance, by turns irreverent and elegiac, embodies the fragmentation of our global conversation on climate change as it veers from anti-science conspiracy theories to the very real impacts of global warming on communities from the Gulf Coast to the Arctic Circle. Floe centers around a portrayal of the Earth itself -- ice, water, and land -- and our interwoven humanity — the people making our planet less hospitable, the people victimized by a changing earth — in short, all of us.
Choreography and direction by Carrie Hanson, text & additional direction by Seth Bockley. Visual design includes projection of images from a changing Arctic and a flooded Houston upon two massive inflatable “icebergs” created by long-time collaborator, visual artist Bob Faust. Sound design by Mikhail Fiksel includes voices from the Arctic region to the Gulf of Mexico, the latter recorded in interviews with civilian rescuers and flood survivors of Hurricane Harvey, during The Seldoms’ January 2019 research residency in Houston. Costume design by Jeff Hancock; projection design by Liviu Pasare; lighting design by Julie E. Ballard; additional technical direction and stage management by Nick Valdivia; performance and movement contributions by The Seldoms ensemble: Solomon Bowser, Philip Elson, Sarah Gonsiorowski, Damon D. Green, Maggie Vannucci
