Summer NITE - The Day on Which a Man Dies
Julia Mayer, Coffee Dance
Poonie’s Cabaret
Second Floor Dance, a HouseHold Arts Production - Independent DanceMaker 1
A Twilightear Production - Belloscurita (Beautiful Darkness)
Lisa Gonzales and Jennifer Kayle - Kinetic Evidence

Summer NITE
The Day on Which a Man Dies
Fridays & Saturdays, February 1-2 & 8-9, 8pm
Sundays, February 3 & 10, 7pm
$15 ($10 students, seniors)

The world premiere of Tennessee Williams’ The Day On Which A Man Dies (1959), a visionary text not offered for public viewing or publication during his lifetime. Per the author's instructions, paintings are created and destroyed in the course of a performance, the bodies of the performers are painted, and the setting is made of paper. Directly influenced by Butoh dance and Yukio Mishima, to whom the work was dedicated, the context is a Happening, with echoes of Kabuki and the anarchic Gutai art movement of 1950's Japan. A wry Mishima stand-in reflects on sex as power as a famous American painter—and the woman who is his mistress—argue violently in a Tokyo hotel room, make up, make love, and betray each other. A decade later Williams would write a realistic play for these characters, with a different story set in the downstairs bar. The Day on Which a Man Dies is something unexpected from the author of The Glass Menagerie: non-Aristotelian, its imagery lifted of off Jackson Pollock, who Williams had befriended in 1940.

SummerNITE is the professional theatre company of the School of Theatre and Dance at Northern Illinois University. Its most recent production was the professional English-language premiere of Romanian playwright Andras Visky's acclaimed DISCIPLES, an example of his "barracks dramaturgy." www.niu.edu/summernite/

David Kaplan (Director) has been staging texts in the United States, Europe and Asia for the past two decades. He is an author, most recently of Tennessee Williams in Provincetown, and serves as curator of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival. SummerNITE is funded in part through the generous support of Richard Ryan.

Julia Mayer
Coffee Dance
Friday, February 1, 9:30am
Free
BYOC (bring your own coffee)

Since July 2006, Julia Mayer has opened her weekly Friday morning solo movement practice to the public once a month. This successful series of engaged, informal performances continues on the First Friday of every month at 9:30am. Each performance will last approximately 20 minutes, with the opportunity for discussion afterward.

As a mother and full-time worker in her forties, Julia Mayer is exploring new paradigms for performance—places, processes, practices—to stay active and to activate audiences to join her in experiencing unique moments of the body moving. In sharing her highly personal movement adventures, Julia invites audience members to contemplate their own creative impulses.

In its first year, CoffeeDance attracted curious, insightful audiences who valued the opportunity to start their day investigating dance and the act of performance in an intimate setting, flooded by daylight. Thanks in part to the rigor and success of this inquiry, Julia has received a prestigious Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist grant for 2007.

[her] movement is refreshingly off the map - Chicago Reader
a delicately luminous, inquisitive stage presence - TimeOut Chicago

Poonie’s Cabaret
Monday, February 4, 8pm
$5

Links Hall’s venue for improvisation and works-in-progress, Poonie’s Cabaret features artists working in varied creative realms including dance, music, puppetry, performance art, theatre, voguing, freestyle rapping, drag, burlesque, cheerleading, stand-up comedy, and more. Named in loving memory of Chicago dancer/choreographer Poonie Dodson, Cabaret proceeds support the Duncan Erley Coming Out of the Closet Fund. Hosted & curated by Jyl Fehrenkamp.

Featuring performances by:

Lisa Gonzales - dancer/puppeteer performing an excerpt of her new work
Ashley Thornton - stand-up comedian extraordinaire
About Face Youth Theatre - performing excerpts of new works
Sarah Haas - performing a duet with Nadia Oussenko
Devin Prietauer - Chicago's very own country singing-sensation!

Second Floor Dance, a HouseHold Arts Production
Independent DanceMaker 1
Friday & Saturday, February 15 & 16, 8pm
Sunday, February 17, 7pm
$15 ($12 students, artists)

An evening-length dance performance featuring juried dance submissions by emerging, independent chorographers. The evening’s program also includes a paneled feedback session with selected choreographers at each performance. Choreographers include: Daman Harun, New York City; Debra Silveus, Indianapolis; Paige Cunningham, Chicago. Each artist will be bringing two pieces and the concert will feature a feedback session. The pieces will range from solos to quartets and each is an original piece.

Second Floor Dance, a Household Arts Production, supports and promotes the interaction of dance artists by producing a venue for independent dance artist to present original works and network with other featured artists. Second Floor offers the audience intellectual art and the opportunity to connect with artists in an intimate setting. www.householdarts.org

Ken Gasch is the Artistic Director of HouseHold Arts Collective, and was named one of Windy City Times’ 30 Under 30 for his contributions to the Chicago GLBTQ community. Ken has worked as a puppeteer and interpreter at the Shedd Aquarium, and danced with the Boofont Sisters cabaret. In 2004, Ken choreographed at the New York Fringe Festival, and served as dance captain for an independent musical film by SpeakProductions, playing at over 40 festivals around the world and winning awards at OutFest 2004, Out Far! 2004, Phoenix International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, 2004 Pixie Flix Festival, and Sydney Mardi Gras Film Festival. Other credits include dancing with Antaeus Dance Company, performing at DNA Dance in New York, choreographing for the Human Rights Campaign 2007 annual gala and the annual TPAN gala and dancing in the independent film Were the World Mine to be released in 2008.

Featuring Work By:
Daman Harun, New York City
Debra Silveus, Indianapolis
Paige Cunningham, Chicago

Lisa Gonzales and Jennifer Kayle
Kinetic Evidence
Friday & Saturday, February 29 & March 1, 8pm
Sunday, March 2, 7pm
$15 ($8 students)

This collection of dances reveals the complexity of inner experience. Two women dance elaborately around their own blind spots, a preacher puppet sells his soul in the depths of a Louisiana swamp, and a group of individuals go back in time by performing everything in reverse, ending at the beginning. Featured collaborators include dance artist Peter Schmitz, composers Berton Beerman and Brandon Evans, and puppeteer Mathew Acheson.

Matt Acheson is a puppeteer and puppet builder who has been working in theater and television for fifteen years. He designs his own marionettes out of found objects to create wonderful, expressive characters. He currently resides in Brooklyn, NY.

Brandon Evans is a freelance music composer who has toured internationally performing in various bands. He currently resides in Brooklyn, N.Y and is a founding member of Ghastly City Sleep.

Peter Schmitz is a freelance choreographer/performer/actor living and working and working and working and working in New York City. He is most fortunate when the work involves collaboration with brilliant performers like Pam Vail and Lisa Gonzales.

Pamela Vail began dancing when she was six years old. She went on to receive a B.A. in dance and sociology from Middlebury College and an M.F.A. in dance from Smith College, after which she spent 8 years living and dancing in New York City. She is a co-founding member of the Architects, a performance improvisation ensemble, with Katherine Ferrier, Lisa Gonzales and Jennifer Kayle. With the Architects, Vail teaches, creates, and performs both choreographed and improvised work nationally and internationally. Vail is also a founding member of critically acclaimed NYC-based Yanira Castro + Company, with whom she has performed, toured and taught extensively for 12 years. In addition, Vail enjoys working with such artists as Peter Schmitz and Heidi Henderson, among others. Currently, Vail is in her sixth year as Artist in Residence and Instructor in Dance at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA . Vail is grateful to be able to maintain her professional career as an artist as she continues to teach; she derives her inspiration from both her students and her peers.

Lisa Gonzales is an independent dance maker, improviser and performing artist. She began her training in choreography and improvisation with Penny Campbell, Andrea Olsen, Peter Schmitz and Jill Becker at Middlebury College where she received her B.A. She went on to earn her M.F.A. from Ohio State University and moved to New York City in 1999 where she was based until 2004. In 1999,with Pamela Vail, Jennifer Kayle and Katherine Ferrier, she founded the Architects, an improvisational dance company that performs nationally and internationally. She has performed and shown her choreography in New York at such venues as DTW, Danspace at St. Mark¹s Church, Joyce Soho, WAX, Joe¹s Pub, John Jay College, Brick Studio, University Settlement and others, as well as in spaces across the United States. Internationally, she has presented her work in Taiwan, Russia and Finland and has been invited to teach and perform in the Dominican Republic in January. She credits many artists with whom she has worked as being influential to her own art making including Peter Schmitz, Penny Campbell, Susan Sgorbati, Andrea Olsen, Deborah Hay, Angie Hauser, Chris Aiken, Paul Matteson, K.J. Holmes, Amy Chavasse, Deana Acheson, her work with the Architects, and others. She has also had the pleasure of touring with choreographer/puppeteer Dan Hurlin in his Obie award-winning work Hiroshima Maiden, and is currently collaborating with New York puppeteers Chris Green and Erin Ore on a work entitled, Tin Lightening, that combines elements of dance, theater, object performance and puppetry. She is beginning a new evening-length dance work which will premier in the fall of 2008. She is a lecturer at Columbia College Chicago and on faculty at the Movement Intensive in Compositional Improvisation which happens annually in June at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, PA.

Jennifer Kayle is an Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa, as well as an independent choreographer, dancer, and improvisational performer. Her work for the recently formed Kayle + Company often includes movable sets, original text, and while speaking directly to the audience, an amplified human voice via recordings, megaphones, and microphones. Most recently, Jennifer¹s choreographed and improvised work has appeared in the Minnesota Fringe Festival, Black Earth Collaborative Arts Company (Iowa), Big Range Dance Festival (Texas), with Immediate Theatre at ADF/Acts to Follow (N.C.), and has appeared this year on stages in Iowa, Massachusetts, Arizona, Helsinki, Finland, and St. Petersburg, Russia. Jennifer has enjoyed presenting in venues including, Judson Church, Merce Cunningham Studio, Jacob’s Pillow (Mass.), and at the ACDF National Gala, The Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C. Upcoming events include the Chicago premiere of her award winning at the receding edges at The Dance Center of Columbia College, and a season at Joyce Soho, New York, NY.

[Gonzales] inhabits the stage as if she had lived there all her life - The New York Times

a wonder of wit and subtle excitement with exquisite timing - Dance Magazine