WEEK TWO
Friday & Saturday, January 11 & 12, 8pm
Sunday, January 13, 7pm
$12 ($10 students, seniors)

Megan Palaima
Walk 45°
Beginning before the audience enters the studio, the performer slowly walks the stage investigating the tension and release of a beginning unseen by the viewer. The audience encounters a performance already involved. Establishing a landscape suggestive of sunrises, this performance installation surrounds the audience with a layered soundtrack of deep tones and melodic static, creating an unspoken collaboration between the performer’s actions and the audience’s frame of viewing.

Megan Palaima is a multi-media performance and installation artist. She creates site-considerate work that addresses the relationship of intimacy and pleasure between the audience, artist, and architecture. Her solo work has been presented in New York at Art in General and The Kitchen, in Chicago at Pilot TV, the MCA, and School of the Art Institute, and in Mexico at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Oaxaca (MACO) in collaboration with twelve other artists and Guillermo Gomez Pena. Megan currently resides in Brooklyn, NY.

K Bradford
Little Miss Tea Party
Inspired by the dissonance and din of post-colonial America, this puppet character is a descendant of the Boston Tea Party, and a propagator of the finest teas and all they have to tell about the world. This work was developed during a Fellowship with the Institute for the Study of Women and Gender In the Arts and Media in 2007.

K. Bradford is a poet and performer whose most recent creative work has been produced while on fellowship with the Institute for the Study of Women & Gender in the Arts and Media at Columbia College Chicago. Through poetry, drag and gender theater, Bradford has performed in Dublin, Berlin, Vancouver, Winnipeg and major US cities over the last decade. Bradford, who received a Masters in Creative Writing from UT-Austin in 1999, has been on poetry scholarships at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Tin House Writers Workshop and is slowly writing towards her first book. Bradford teaches literature and poetry at Columbia College Chicago, for Young Chicago Authors’ Saturday Writing Program and for the Raw Works, an after-school poetry, storytelling & performance program for LGBTQ youth.

Janet Schmid
Two pieces: Lopsided & Craptastic
Lopsided is Schmid’s solo tap dance with one platform shoe, one tap shoe, 12 resin shoe maker forms, eight springs, and one accordion skirt, with Steve Jarvis on the Hammond Organ. Craptastic is a work about resilience for five dancers: Wannapa P-Eubanks, Aislinn Gagliardi, Angeline Gragasin, Erica Mott, and Megan Rhyme.

Janet Schmid has presented her choreography at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Athenaeum Theatre, Links Hall and the Spareroom as well as in vacant lots, music co-ops, parked cars, nightclubs, park district buildings and loft spaces throughout Chicago. Her repertoire includes Green (2007), Siamese Twin Solo (2006), Pilotless, Foot Opera, Speedbump (2005), Laundry Pile, Big Ball of Body (2003) and Umbilical Tilt (2002).

(Schmid’s) movement is...simultaneously intense and ludicrous
- Laura Molzahn, The Chicago Reader

An absurdly funny evocation of writhing humanity.
- Nina Metz, The Chicago Tribune

Like an ‘outsider artist,’ Janet Schmid’s dance has a naive sophistication
- Asimina Chremos, Time Out

Wannapa Pimtong-Eubanks
White Balloon
This butoh dance is about a girl’s awkward journey to catch a white balloon. Organic movement is explored by the performer and influenced by the movement of the balloon. Butoh, also known as "dance of darkness," is a postmodern form that began in Japan as an effort to recover the primal body. Installation Artist: Renee Prisble Una, Composer: Ika.Komura. www.myspace.com/wannadanceland

Wannapa Pimtong-Eubanks is a butoh performer inspired by Akira Kasai, Yumiko Yoshioka, and Marianne Kim. She performed her choreography, The Rebirth of Pain in the 2003 PAC/Edge Festival, A Moment of Jane Doe in the 3rd Annual Full Circle Danztheatre Festival 2006, Trapped in the “Joie de Vivre”, an event tribute to Hurricane Katrina survivors and victims [2007], and Manimal in John Cage's Musicircus 2007. She has performed for Meredith Monk, Marianne Kim, Becca Hopson, Laura Crotte's [Nido de Mar Theatre], Kimberly Senior [in Estrogen Fest 2005], Janet Schmid's Pilotless, and Drive by Performance Series 2005, This is not a pipe for Adler Danztheatre Project and Around the Coyote Festival 2006, and The Voices Project: Chicago 2007 for Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble. Wannapa has studied with Natsu Nakajima, Katsura Kan, Akira Kasai, Marianne Kim, Mei-Kuang Chen, and Wen Ching-ching of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan. She has also been trained in Acting at Act I studios.

Renee Prisble Una is a sculptor and installation artist working in Chicago. She earned her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998, and her MFA from Alfred University in 2002. Her multi media approach to making is contemplative and explores ideas through an investigative approach to materials. She has shown in the U.S., including at The International Museum of Surgical Science, The Polish Museum of America, The Freedom Museum, and NAB Gallery in Chicago, and is currently teaching at Loyola University Chicago.
una-love.com/renee

Ika.Komura is an electronic music project from where Norway meets Tokyo blending the sounds of childhood memories with the technology and trends of the future. Using the ingredients of video game music, the sound of the 80's and especially the dreamlike Country of Japan are the main elements. Ika.Komura has produced soundtracks for short films and is currently working on a debut album. www.myspace.com/ikakomura

3 card molly
She Waited. She Worried. She Wept.
This performance, a loose adaptation of the 1961 film Cleo from 5 to 7 by Agnes Varda, acknowledges the tension between superficial high-gloss beauty and life's deeper meanings. A spoiled pop singer confronts her own death and, what's worse for her, the possibility of ugliness and disfigurement. With text and sound, evocative movement sequences, and an uncanny ability to embrace absurdity, 3 card molly re-imagines this innovative film into a stirring meditation on mortality and female identity. www.3cardmolly.org

3 card molly is a collaboration between Ania Greiner and Liz Winfield. Using a playful mix of modern dance, butoh, physical theater, video, and sculpture, 3 card molly encourages their audiences to look at objects and their surroundings with fresh eyes, as if seeing them for the very first time. Liz and Ania each hold an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Media from Columbia College Chicago. They have created performances and videos for Intimate and Epic: Small Acts for the City in Millennium Park, Random House: Epic, the Pac/Edge Festival, and the Collision Symposium at the University of Victoria in Canada, among others.

Clare Dolan (Vermont)
The Road to Brody
This puppetry piece is a retelling of a short story by Russian Jewish writer Isaac Babel. Babel was born in Odessa, lived through war and revolution, and wrote many short stories, newspaper articles, and filmscripts before being murdered by Stalin in the 1930s. The story is one of Babel's Red Calvary stories, but it succeeds to be more than just a lyrical anti-war tome. In turning his keen eye towards the small everyday life interactions of ordinary people, Babel deftly reveals greater truths about the generosity and avarice of human beings and the sheer beauty of life, despite all of its brutality and disappointments.

The show is performed in the Toy Theater style, using a miniature proscenium stage, puppets, cardboard cut-outs and the magic of toy theater trompe l'oie tricks to retell this powerful story of war. The Road to Brody is part of a full evening-length puppet show entitled Line and Color, which is partially funded by the Jim Henson Foundation and is a production of the Performance Department of The Museum of Everyday Life.

Clare Dolan is a performer, director, and artist based in Vermont. As a puppeteer for twelve years with the Bread and Puppet Theater, she has performed in cities and towns throughout the United States, South America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. While currently living a secret double life as a nurse in her small Vermont town, she lectures and leads workshops in a wide range of arenas from small town community centers to mountain villages in Mexico to inner city schools. She also creates, performs, and participates in collaborative projects in puppet theater, cantastoria, and toy theater. She is a stilt dancer and instructor, and also the founder and chief curator of The Museum of Everyday Life, an ongoing multifaceted revolutionary museum experiment based in Vermont, and Ms. Dolan’s brain.