21 October Sunday
Our first official showcase of Formidable Dreams, created and produced by collaboration between Eugene Sun Park and Sara Zalek in Dance-for-Camera Screenings in Claudia Cassidy Theater from 11am-1:30pm. Formidable Dreams screens at 11:55am and includes an all day installation in the G.A.R. Rotunda.
as part of: Elevate Chicago Dance
Chicago Cultural Center
ALL DAY – Free and open to the public
Formidable Dreams is a short film exploring isolation, dysphoria, and dreams of potential transformation. Through tableaux, operatic voice, and their curious interactions, these trickster heroines explore desire, longing, and the quest for the external elixir. In between conscious and subconscious places, these trickster characters enact both social and primal behavior, with an earnest desire to commune and elevate their status. Their vocalizations are hypnotic, reverent, absurd, and bizarre. Through images, movement, and sound, this film is an elusive narrative that creates a sense of bewilderment and curiosity.
Formidable Dreams takes place in urban, natural, and fantastical landscapes, using elements of Butoh, Opera, and improvisation as frameworks for exploration and development. Presentations and workshops evolve into interactive events featuring live performance with dancers, performers, musicians, and sculptural objects.
THANK YOU ❤
Many amazing artists from the Chicago community made this possible! Special thanks to Eugene Sun Park for the ideas and inspiration and keeping the candle burning for three years; performing still the cast of Heroes, Hanna Brock, Here Heather Marie, Elaine Lemieux, and Sara Goodman; editors Tracy Pitts and Lexi Midkiff; Gwyneth Anderson for Stop-motion photography; extraordinary Camera Operators and handsome bachelors ETC Joe Lim, Brian Zahm, Ed Bornstein, Sound Mixer: John Wong, Sound Engineer Specialist; and Event Photographers Rebecca Ciprus and Ji Yang
Event Photographer; Associate Producer/Production Manager/1st AD Gustavo Martin; Production Assistants Quinn Nicholson, Shir Avinadav, Angie Panganiban, Umnia Khan, George Ellzey, Katherine Johnson, Rebecca Ladida, and Molly Hewitt; Mark Leja, Media Manager; Kevin Oliver-Krohn, Grip; Dylan Morris AC; Max Bryan, 2nd AC; plus final color corrections and trailer by Hannah Kim, PLUS Eryka Dellenbach for the documentation and film of Elevate performance 2017; and Chad Hagedorn for helping me realize the installation doors.
The film portion of this project is supported by Chicago Dancemakers Forum, an Individual Artist Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events, the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency through federal funds provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Cheney Foundation. Special thanks for development opportunities by Light Box, Detroit and locations that made it possible, including Silent Funny and the Chicago Cultural Center.
Directors statement:
We, Eugene Sun Park and Sara Zalek, began to work together in 2012 and collaborated on some successful projects before beginning Formidable Dreams. With themes of identity and loss in mind—personal, racial, national, ethnic, gender—we have found many creative confluences. Our interests in displacement, myth, and the surreal; the search for our subconscious selves, our humanity, and dreams of potential transformation. We look to comparative mythology to reframe and recontextualize origin stories, to reshape current paradigms of cultural identity. The trickster hero characters in these films move in liminal and subconscious spaces. They rediscover their relationship to the world through their connection to architecture and each other. Through images, movement, and sound, these characters create a sense of bewilderment and curiosity as beings who continually seek to rediscover themselves. We consider the creative potential in all humans as powerful shapeshifters, mythmakers, and transformers of culture.
Butoh Curious Chi 