Trade Routes, Festival of Artistic Exchange

TRADE ROUTES,

A Festival of Artistic Exchange

2 WEEKS // 10 WORKS // 5 DOUBLE BILLS // 5 OUT OF TOWNERS  // 5 LOCALS // 5 $1500 AWARDS

NOV 30-DEC 9, 2017 @ Links Hall

Winifred Haun & Dancers (CHI) | Kanopy Dance Company (WI)

Thursday November 30 @ 7pm  

Saturday December 1 @ 7pm  

J’Sun Howard (CHI) | Brother(hood) Dance! (NY)

Friday December 1 @ 7pm

Monday December 4 @ 7pm  

Mitsu Salmon (CHI) | Michael Sakamoto (IA)

Sunday December 3 @ 7pm

Saturday December 9 @ 9pm  

ATOM-r (CHI) | Upended Teacups (MI) 

Thursday December 7 @ 7pm 

Friday December 8 @ 9pm

Myra Su (CHI) | Emily Schubert (MD)

Friday December 8 @ 7pm  

Saturday December 9 @ 7pm   

Winifred Haun & Dancers (CHI) | Kanopy Dance Company (WI)

Trashed

Winifred Haun

Trashed is an international choreographic collaboration between Chicago Choreographer Winifred Haun and Australian circus artist Emma Serjeant. The work combines Modern Dance with Contemporary Circus to tell the story of how humans have to come to clutter their lives with too much stuff, and how all that stuff keeps us from each other. The mission of Winifred Haun & Dancers is to create and produce the dance works of Ms. Haun and other midwest artists and to make those works available to the widest possible audience.

Bound and Determined / Lamentation Variation / Prelude & Fugue

Kanopy Dance Company

Lamentation Variation is an ongoing creative project for the Martha Graham Company, originally conceived to commemorate the anniversary of 9/11. It premiered Nov 15, 2013 at the Overture Center for the Arts, Madison, WI. Lamentation Variation was created in association with, and using the creative structure provided by, the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance. Kanopy Dance Company’s mission is “to promote, encourage, and increase the public’s knowledge of and appreciation for the arts, including the art of dance; to coordinate and provide services to the arts to foster their growth and practice; and, to engage and teach the art of dance.”

J’Sun Howard (CHI) | Brother(hood) Dance! (NY)

Working on Better Versions of Prayers

J’Sun Howard

Working On Better Versions of Prayers creates charismatic space for black boy joy. A poetic testimony that miracles erupt at any moment. A portrait in blue looking an intimacy between men of color, acts of practicing freedom, and radical hope, that is hope directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is, an imaginative excellence. J’Sun Howard is a Chattanooga native and a Chicago-based dancemaker and poet.

how to survive a plague

Brother(hood) Dance!

how to survive a plague is an interdisciplinary meditation on the artistic generational gap between those lost in the global epidemic, AIDS. Brother(hood) Dance! investigates who survives and whose stories are told during and after life. This work explores the methods of healing, care-giving, and living testimonies by creating an intentional space with sound, movement, and aroma. This ritualistic experience will venerate the Black African bodies that were exiled from the urgency of care. Brother(hood) Dance! is an interdisciplinary duo that seeks to inform its audiences on the socio-political and environmental injustices from a global perspective, bringing clarity to the same-gender-loving African-American experience in the 21st century.

Mitsu Salmon (CHI) | Michael Sakamoto (IA)

Tsuchi

Mitsu Salmon

“Simultaneously moving, informative and at times heart-wrenching, the ambitious scale of Salmon’s work continues to impress.”

--New City

Tsuchi is a solo interdisciplinary performance piece. It draws from Mitsu’s great-grandfather’s experience of immigrating from Japan to Hawaii as a farmer and then becoming his dream of being a high-end waiter. The work explores questions of family and travel through Butoh, contemporary dance, and everyday movements with music and text. The work is a collaboration between Mitsu and sound artists Alyssa Moxley and Kevin Carey. Development of Tsuchi was sponsored by High Concept Labs and supported by a residency at the Chicago Cultural Center and Oxbow. Mitsu Salmon creates original performance and visual works, which fuse multiple disciplines. She was born in the melting pot of Los Angeles to a Japanese mother and American father.

blind spot

Michael Sakamoto

Michael Sakamoto, and audio collaborator Christopher Jette presents excerpts from blind spot, a work-in-progress dance and sound performance. Using Michael's autobiographical narrative and visual metaphors from photography and cinema, blind spot addresses the intersection between intellectual property, corporate militarism and personal narrative. The work is a collaboration with Christopher Jette. Sakamoto is an interdisciplinary artist active in dance, theatre, media and photography and one of the leading butoh-based performers in the USA

ATOM-r (CHI) | Upended Teacups (MI)

Kjell Theøry

ATOM-r

“Kjell Theøry blurs multiple lines: between performance art and theater, theater and installation art, installation art and video, video and poetry. The group aims to question formal practice, the boundaries and binaries that tend to delimit image making and performance. By confounding form, ATOM-R simultaneously grapples with historical mechanics of homosexuality and queerness, and with how queer aesthetics have carried over to a society newly augmented by technology.”

--Sasha Geffen, Chicago Reader

Kjell Theøry is an Augmented Reality performance juxtaposing the writings of Alan Turing—a gay twentieth century computing pioneer—about pattern and shape in the natural world with algorithmic mutations of Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1917 play The Breasts of Tiresias, a gender fluid spectacle for which the playwright invented the word “surrealism.” Anatomical Theatres of Mixed Reality (ATOM-r) is a collective exploring 21st century embodiment through performance, poetics and emerging technologies. The work mixes the live body with ubiquitous computing through an implementation of Augmented Reality (AR) in which virtual content is overlaid onto bodies and spaces.

The Call

Upended Teacups

The Call asks: “How do we navigate our spiritual landscape and where is God to be found?... Through our acts of devotion, songs and dances; our labor? Further, how does geography affect our spiritual condition?” Upended Teacups is the collaborative identity of artists Stefanie Cohen and Corey Gearhart.

For more information about ATOM-r & Upended Teacups, go to http://www.linkshall.org/atom-r-upended-teacups/

Myra Su (CHI) | Emily Schubert (MD)

Through the Lookingglass / Copy & Paste

Myra Su

Set in backcountry America, Through the Lookingglass is a psychological thriller of Alec, a young boy on his first deer hunt. In this Midwestern retelling of the classic coming-of-age story, Alec confronts death and the savage power of man for the first time. Copy & Paste: One rainy day on the way to work, a female employee at a press office discovers that she, and everything around her is made out of paper. Myra Su is a narrative artist specializing in storytelling through puppetry and theater.

Resist the Gloom / Heart Splinters

Emily Schubert & the Society of Realistic Optimism

Resist the Gloom is a performance about coping with anxiety at large. The story is a type of Cantastoria or “sung story” utilizing a giant flip book of images, sounds, and a partially sung script.

Heart Splinters is a paper cut shadow play that tells a story about life’s interconnectedness and the possibility found therein. Emily Schubert is an interdisciplinary artist working mainly in the worlds of puppetry, performance, sculpture and collage.