November 2 Julia Mayer, Coffee Dance
November 2-4 SAIC Student Performance Festival New Blood
November 9-11 Matter of Reaction Movement Project, Inward Mobility
November 10 Beverly Nelson, The Time it Takes
November 16-18 POETRY Presents Frank Bidart’s The Third Hour of the Night
November 30-December 2 OPENPORT

New Blood: SAIC Student Performance Festival
Friday & Saturday, November 2 & 3, 8pm
Sunday, November 4, 7pm
Free

School of the Art Institute of Chicago Graduate and Undergraduate students perform in a weekend festival of recent works. Presented in three distinct programs focusing on sound, durational work, and live performances, these artists blur the boundaries between theater, movement, and the visual arts, and collectively present a vision of the next wave of performance art. For additional information on this program and a full line-up, visit www.saic.edu/bettyrymer

Matter of Reaction Movement Project
Inward Mobility
Friday-Sunday, November 9 -11, 8pm
$10

Inward Mobility explores the physical and emotional limits of movement while creating work within a collaborative and improvisational environment. Showcasing the varied repertory of co-artistic directors Kathleen Hickey, Renee Murray, and Kristin Pavelka, there is an emphasis on interpersonal connections as well as pushing the boundaries within those relationships. Live music and sound design created and performed by Mark Jamerson. Matter of Reaction Movement Project formed in August of 2006, and premiered their inaugural modern dance concert iN fLUX in March 2007. www.myspace.com/mrmpchicago

Kathleen Hickey is a 24-year-old graduate of Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN. Majoring in Political Science, Hickey grew in the Purdue Repertory Dance Company family and met her fellow artistic directors there. She emphasizes performance as well as emotional availability in her pieces, while pulling from the vast knowledge she received from the dance faculty of Purdue. Within that knowledge, Kathleen has recently developed a better appreciation of and interest in contact improvisation.

Renee Murray graduated from Purdue University majoring in Communication and a minor in Dance. At Purdue, she danced and choreographed for the Purdue Repertory Dance Company, where she gained a greater understanding of modern movement as well as her own capabilities. She has also performed with RTG Dance and T J & Company Dance Theater. Renee has recently found a new interest in contact improvisation. She is currently working with Jeff Wallace in a new work created by Sally Wallace, renowned faculty member of Purdue University.

Kristin Pavelka recently received her Masters of Arts in Dance Movement Therapy and Counseling at Columbia College Chicago, and she is currently working as a clinical therapist at Maryville Academy with adolescents who have mental illness and developmental delay. She graduated from Purdue University majoring in Psychology and minoring in Dance. Kristin performed and choreographed for the Purdue Repertory Dance Company and the University of Michigan Department of Dance. In her choreography, she focuses on exploring relational, psychological, and emotional concepts.

Beverly Nelson
The Time it Takes
Saturday November 10, 3pm
Free

Nelson uses historical research, sound, and language to perform metaphorical representations of women, rituals, and war. This project is also developed from an ongoing fascination with The Last Post, which is performed every day by buglers in Ieper, Belgium at the World War I memorial Menin Gate.
http://timetakes.blogspot.com

Beverly Nelson left a life of abuse and poverty to go to school at age 47. Her performances, installations, and photography have consistently exposed the injustices and indifference towards women caught in violent situations. By telling her own story and pointing to the lives of women worldwide, she offers hope and encouragement to those all who are struggling to survive, and evokes compassion from those who have been more fortunate. In 2006 she received her MFA in Creative Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

OPENPORT
A Weekend of Realtime Performance, Sound, & Language
Friday-Sunday, November 30-December 2, 7:30pm
$12 ($10 Students, Seniors, Unemployed)

OPENPORT is a convergence of artists from a set of distinct contemporary practices including movement-based live art, experimental sound, performance writing, and electronic poetry. Through the use of the live body and an engagement with realtime composition and machine-processes, artists complicate and re-map notions of language, physicality, space, and time, navigating the hidden terrains of our networked culture. OPENPORT was originally conceived as part of Links Hall’s Artistic Associates program in February 2007 as a month-long international festival. This weekend event includes performances from the festival creators and OPENPORT artists currently based in Chicago. www.openportchicago.com

Friday November 30

Fiona Wright (UK)
On Lying
Last seen as the “early version” in Chicago at OPENPORT festival at Links Hall in February and now returning again via Battersea Arts Centre, London and the Star and Shadow Cinema, Newcastle earlier this year – catch this before the European tour in 2008…Supported by the Arts Council of England

Judd Morrissey (US)
Books that Write Me, Books I Write
Part I: from The Error Engine
A meditation on memory, accident, and the book, a continuity made of discontinuity, a text that, as it emerges, has already been interrupted and re-composed by real-time processes. The error is not in what comes from the endless machine-driven re-combinations and intrusions, but is what cannot be retrieved from the lost experience of narrative cognition.

Nathan Butler US and Lori Talley (US)
double-pole, double-throw
This duo creates a whistling performance with the aid of tea kettles, heat sensors and amplifiers. The performance explores Lori's inability to whistle with pitch and the desire to overcome this limitation through the use of simple electronics and sonic experiments.

Saturday December 1

Sunday December 2