Join us, Saturday afternoon March 4, as we tie dye our Hot Mess! T-shirts and anything else 100% cotton with the master of fabrics, Ms. Mary Tabar. We will provide HM t-shirts, and BYO any Clothing Swap items & anything else you’d like to try. Also! There’s a Photo Booth with our great friend Ricardo Adame, so bring some oldies, get some freshies, and smile in the BEST light! We will have a pot of Veggie Chili and some glorious fixins’ to boot. BYO anything else you’d like to share, not required but adored! FREE
PLUS Get a behind the scenes look at OBS and chill with friends! We’ll be playing some HOT Hits from the 7 previous Hot Mess! episodes, talking about what’s in store for 2023.
This Baltimore based movement initiative brewed from an idea to collaborate between Cristal Sabbagh and Peter Redgrave. It began in 2017, as a container to explore horizontal organization in ensemble performance. Seeking to bring the macrocosm of our embodied histories into the microcosm of group dynamics, we make time to listen to all the voices in the space and create work we are all excited to perform. Over time, Move Move Collaborative has adapted to center care and become an intentional space of exploration across difference.
Move Move hosts an annual gathering where people come together to share body based practices and modes of thinking with the body, all while keeping our sense organs facing performance. This past summer (and last), the group met on the land of company member Orlando Johnson, Gray’s Manor Farm:
Gray’s Manor Farm is a parcel of land located between the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay and Patuxent River near Port Republic, Mutual Consent, Island Creek in Maryland. Gray’s Manor is a Black and Piscataway descent – owned farm that has been in my family since 1830. I stepped up to inherit the land 14 years ago. While we allowed family and friends to farm it, no one had resided on the property for 12 years before I got it.
Today I am practicing permaculture and herbalism. I have been amending the soil and working on the future of the property, being a means of sanctuary and solitude, a wellness center. One of the main goals is to be a place where people can have peace in all the simple and complex ways the land can provide.
Orlando Johnson
Saturday, November 12 4:20pm & 8:00pm Central Standard Time
Hot Mess! Episode 7 features MOVE MOVE Collaborative artists working on score developments in real time, together. (visit World Clock to find your location time) Each set lasts 60-90 minutes
Baltimore_Chicago bridge featuring artists of Move Move Collaborative 2022: Orlando Johnson, Peter Redgrave, Cristal Sabbagh, Ashley Shey, Matt Williams, Emmett Wilson, Chrissy Martin, Lorene Bouboushian, Sara Zalek, plus Ralph Darden and Dalia Chin
Supported in part by the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events, especially for #YearofChicagoDance #yocd
Earlier in the Day, check them out plus many more at Family Day at the MCA 11:00am. See ffftchicago.com for details.
Members of Move Move Collaborative: Cristal Sabbagh’s performance practice, rooted in improvisation and Butoh, walks a line between the everyday, the divine, the personal, and the political. In embodying in her art transformational memories while simultaneously celebrating pop culture and the experimental, she challenges power structures and awakens the viewer’s senses. Working both in a solo capacity and with collaborators, Sabbagh is equally attuned to individual perspectives and collective structures. Her son, Julius Sabbagh joins her making his own music composed using app technology.
Peter Redgrave is an interdisciplinary performing artist and educator based in Baltimore, Maryland. In his solo work, he explores vulnerability and the direct energetic exchange between performer and audience. In collaborative work he values the complex and deep connection of consensus. He cut his performing teeth in 1990’s Chicago in performative bands like Mother Country Death Rattle, 2X4, and Smelling Salt Amusements. Since 2010 he has trained with dancers, opening and accessing joints, unlocking images held in the fibres of the body. He works in improvisation and score based movement work. Redgrave often uses open adaptable structures to build performances which can be shaped by the spaces where they are presented. He has performed at Under the Counter Culture in Cardiff, Wales, the High Zero Festival, AKIMBO, a festival for site specific dance, Transmodern Festival, and the Philadephia Freeform Festival in 2016. He has performed across North America and Europe.
Orlando Johnson is an interdisciplinary artist, musician, herbalist and activist. He is the steward of Gray’s Manor Farm, a permaculture center in Calvert County, MD that has been African-American owned since 1830. Orlando has performed with Chris Taylor, Baba L’Salaam, Isa Leal, Peter Redgrave, and Jeron White. He has curated art exhibitions and performances including a benefit for Standing Rock. He has performed in High Zero Festival, Fields Fest 2016, and with the Move Move Collaborative. All of Orlando’s work is an expression of protest for the discontent around how we conduct ourselves as a society. He seeks to tend the conditions that we need as organisms in a robust, vital, and healthy ecosystem.
Ashley Shey is a body linguist. She is a first generation Cameroonian American artist born in Washington, DC who carries on her cultural traditions of dance and storytelling as a means for remembrance and self-knowledge. Through improvisational dance and experimental performance, she engages the potential for alchemical transformation in each moment through use of meditative movement.
Emmett Wilson is also called ‘Ew! The Dancer’ amongst other names that are connected to stories they tell with their body. They grew up dancing in the Houston Met Dance studio, earned a BFA at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, where they stayed and made many body-based performances while working as the community garden coordinator of The City Library; they’re now planted in Philadelphia where they were a fellow at the Headlong Performance Institute in the spring of 2021. They often venture down to Baltimore to be with their cousin and her son (who’s a dog named Lhasa), and to play with friends and artists in MoveMove. Emmett graduated from the Crestone Healing Arts Center in May of 2022- their practice is called Dear Body. All of Emmett’s work hinges upon improvisationally harnessing the power of embarrassment and stewarding ecosystems in biological as well as psycho-spiritual ways.
Matthew Williams is a Baltimore-based nonbinary interdiscilinary artist and educator working in dance/performance. Their performance practice is inspired by the human body as a site for choice, liberation, and a means to be in relationship with place and community. Matthew has organized for Move Move Collaborative, an annual movement intensive where artists gather in Baltimore to make a performance by consensus. They have taught acting at Towson University, community movement research, and nature-based youth education. Matthew has BA in American Cultural Studies (Bates College) and an MFA in Theatre Arts (Towson University), has been published by Emergency Index, Witchcraft, Hyrsteria, and PotluckMag. Their performance work has been presented by: Labbodies Performance Art Review,Transmodern Festival, and Baltimore Independent Dance Artists.
Chrissy Martin is an interdisciplinary performance artist and movement educator with roots in contemporary dance forms, Afro-Caribbean dance, postmodern experimental music, jazz vocals, and physical theater. Chrissy blends contemporary dance and language/voice to rigorously examine her intersecting queer and neurodivergent identities. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in music with a focus on social praxis from New College of Florida in 2010 and received her MFA in choreography and performance from Smith College in 2022. Somatic practices such as Pilates, GYROTONIC® Expansion System, Body Mind Centering and Laban/Bartenieff Fundamentals inform Chrissy’s integrated movement style, and she is a certified Pilates and GYROTONIC® instructor. Martin is an avid member of the global contact improvisation community, and has facilitated and taught contact around the midwest.
Lorene Bouboushian (they/them) is a genderqueer artist exploring lament as a form of critique and query into late capitalist woes. They utilize their experience in various somatic modalities to purposefully place their moving body and shapeshifting voice in uncomfortable, difficult situations. This is an attempt to shoot the quotidian psychological terror and apathy (i.e. the synthesized residue of on-demand streaming services, doomscrolling, virtue signaling, cultural amnesia, supply chain issues, civil forfeiture, etc.) through the body and back out to all of you. Refrigerated ancestral trauma and white guilt also make a consistent appearance. http://lorenebouboushian.org
Chicago-based Costa Rican flutist Dalia Chin is a founding member of Fonema Consort and the Chicago Composers Orchestra, both of which are dedicated to performing music by living composers. She has been in residence and given performances at institutions including New England Conservatory, the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, Oberlin Conversarory, Harvard University, the Universidad de Costa Rica, Scripps College, UNAM (Mexico City), the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, the 113 Composers Collective and North Central College. She has performed in festival and at venues including Visiones Sonoras (Morela), the Florida Flute Convention, Festival Interfaz (Monterrey), Omaha Under the Radar, the Ear Taxi Festival, the Festival Internacional de Chihuahua, the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo ( Mexico City), the Teatro Sucre (Quito), the City of Chicago’s Pritzker Pavilion, and National Sawdust.
Ralph Darden is a Chicago-based musician, DJ & composer. As an adolescent he developed a profound love of hip hop, jazz, reggae, and punk. This played an essential role in the formation of his musical identity.
He spent the 90s learning the process of writing, recording, and touring in several DIY punk bands. In the early 2000s, Darden was the founder, lead singer & multi-instrumentalist of the dub-infused post punk group, The Jai Alai Savant. He currently tours and performs as a guitarist and backing vocalist with Ted Leo & The Pharmacists.
Darden composes music for films & television. Some examples of his previous work include Polish Bar (2010), The Inheritance (2011), Lac Du Flambeau (2012), Comcast’s Gross World (2012) and Mondo Media’s Happy Tree Friends (2015), As well as commercial work for Hasbro’s Transformers Kreo (2016) and Melagro Tequila (2016). In 2021, he began his foray into the world of collaborative improvisation by providing live score for Yasmine Spiro’s visual art & dance performance titled Dawtas.
For nearly 3 decades, Darden has been DJing events around the globe under the moniker of “DJ Major Taylor”. Starting in Philadelphia in the mid 90’s, he states “..initially I just wanted to be a casual selector, playing roots and dub reggae records, but I found myself immersed in a world of really amazing hip hop DJs & turntablists & that influenced me in a big way.” As DJ Major Taylor, his scratch-laden, dance-friendly, genre-defying sets, showcase an ability to weave his eclectic palate of influences into a sonic tapestry, distinctly his own. His experience as a DJ has informed his recent experiments in beat-making and sound collage.
Boston_Chicago bridge, featuring artists: Aza, Amanu, Jinlu Luo, Dubi Kaufman, Christine Shallenberg, Sara June & Max Lord
Hot Mess! is a play space where we invite the chaos of the unfamiliar into our process, together. We focus on the moments of co-creation, discover new ways of working together, interacting with the audience, connecting both in person and online. Hot Mess! demonstrates the power of working together in the unknown, seeks possibilities for Queering space, and centers the joy and beauty in re-starting while making art! All ages are invited.
Supported in part by the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events, especially for #YearofChicagoDance #yocd
Baltimore_Chicago bridge featuring artists of Move Move Collaborative: Orlando Johnson, Chrissy Martin, Peter Redgrave, Cristal Sabbagh, Ashley Shey, Matt Williams, Emmett Wilson, Lorene Bouboushian, Sara Zalek, plus DJ Major Taylor and Dalia Chin
Elastic Arts is a non-profit organization that fosters a community of music, art and performance in the Avondale/Logan Square neighborhoods of Chicago and beyond through developing, hosting, producing, and promoting creative, independent, and local music concerts, exhibitions, and multi-arts performances.
Amanu
Featured Artist bios: Amanu started their storytelling journey through make-believe w/ their sibling creating worlds and characters to inhabit. Soon spiral notebooks birthed drawings, stories, and poetry. It wasn’t long until they fell in love with freestyling & helped form the rap crew, Jus-Us League. In 2001 they moved to Chicago & joined the jazz-based band Daily Bridge Club. In 2007 joined the iNNERvISIONISTS, an organic Hip-Hop band. There, they met Casagrown, formed the rap duo BADWOLFF & perform all over Chicago at venues such as Beat Kitchen, Subterranean, Elbo Room, and The Mutiny. Amanu’s poetry stylings are rooted in rituals of storytelling & the delights of language.
Aza
Aza is a performance and visual artist and co-conspirator at No Nation Tangential Unspace Art Lab. This Coalescence is one to galavant in dreamscapes, ancestral juke joints, chaturbate masturbation web temples, loose-tooth tanks, and the Heartspace. They organize Smudge Cinema Project, a now-and-then screening series that takes a look at what happens when a film is projected on a wall for people to watch. Metabolization seems to be what they appear to do, lately.
Sara June
Sara June is a Boston-based performance artist working primarily in butoh, movement improvisation and installation. She is the director of the annual Boston Butoh Festival and is co-director of Boston’s oldest experimental artists’ collective, the Mobius Artists Group. She and sound artist Max Lord compose the performance duo Lord and June whose past commissions include a gallery performance for an exhibition of the acclaimed Hiroshima Panels by Japanese artists Iri and Toshi Maruki at Boston University and an outdoor movement and spatialized-sound work for Fujiko Nakaya’s Fog x FLO installation in Frederick Law Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace.
Max Lord
Max Lord is a Boston-based improvisor who has worked in a variety of rock, noise, electronic and improv settings. Though originally identifying as a percussionist, since 2000 he has performed with Buchla electronic instruments including the Marimba Lumina, an exotic mallet controller. His recorded work as Ghost Grass recalls mid-century electronic experimentation as often as more modern improvised approaches, and is intimately tied to the magnetic medium on which it is created.
Dubi Kaufman
Dubi Kaufmanm makes interactive art. He uses code, cellphones, screen printing or bicycle parts to make art that sparks joy.
Christine Shallenberg is a multimedia artist whose work ranges in scale from performative physical encounters to mediated light and sound installations to participatory choreographies for audiences. Christine has been nominated for a Bessie (NY Dance and Performance Award) in visual design for David Neumann’s Restless Eye, for which she designed a system for scanning and translating the performers’ EEG brain waves into large-scale lighting shifts for the entire performance space. She also worked as the Lighting Designer for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for whom she designed Second Hand, Antic Meet, Nearly 902 and more than 30 unique Event performances seen around the world.
Jinlu Luo I’m not very good at explaining my work through concepts, but I believe that while a personal history can be cosmetically touched-up, the history of one’s art cannot be changed. Once work is done it is done. My artwork is my soul, my emotions, my feelings, and my heart, displaying my experience of the world. My dramatization of thought is for my own purpose. I’m the audience of my own performance. What I can get a witness is not necessarily the performance product, which is to say the staging of ideas to audience eyes, but rather the dramatization of thought in the creative process itself. The staging of a performer-position gives second life to a personality. For this moment, being the director is not simply a metaphor for the struggle to make decisions but more a creative practical strategy to determine the route of a collaborative body. I consider the importance of casting as an alternative family, and thus my solo is a single-person household. My self-presentation is my own house, a solitary architecture on an open landscape of audience. This building oneself to a particular structure is always a moment of suffering. Here is a person-role.
Producer and Director of Hot Mess!, Sara Zalek is an Avant-garde maker of situations and curious objects. Rooted in physical investigations of improvisation, resilience, and transformation, their work is intimate, raw, poetic. They create performances, learning situations, and sensing environments to encourage thoughtful interpersonal connections.
Sara Zalek
Zalek performs often and in both live and online situations; most recently named an “Esteemed Artist” by The City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE). In 2021 they held a curatorial residence at Elastic Arts, and in 2020 were in virtual residence at the Dance Center at Columbia College of Chicago, a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist (2015), a 3Arts Make a Wave Awardee, and a Ragdale Foundation Fellow. They have performed and curated workshops and festivals at the Chicago Cultural Center, Elastic Arts, Experimental Sound Studio, Links Hall, Japanese Culture Center, CoProsperity Sphere, No Nation Tangential Unspace Art Lab, dfbrl8r, Outerspace, UrBandGuild, and many more.
SUNFLOWERS FOR ZVENIGORA*
Wannapa P-Eubanks performs at a performance art series to benefit refugees from Ukraine. Photo by Liv Nunn Band
with Wannapa P-Eubanks Saturday Aug.27 & Sunday Aug.28, 2022 10am – 1pm each day Location: (TBA outdoors in Evanston, IL)
Two day workshop culminating in group ritual performance. Three hours each day, outside and under the sky!
Mindfully focus on unearthing deep connection to oneself, each other, and Nature. Weaving these elements relationship, telling story and expressing it through Butoh movements and/or words, etc…[Sky is unlimited]
In hope to re-inspire, to re-spark joy and sense of togetherness.
What to bring: Yoga mat and blanket for some on the ground work, comfortable layers, clothes, snacks and water. Stay hydrated! Include bug spray or sunscreen as needed.
All levels are welcome. Email me with any questions or accessibility needs.
Wannapa performing at Freedom From and Freedom To at Elastic Arts. Photo by Liina Raud
Wannapa P-Eubanks is as a Butoh dance performer, Improviser, Choreographer, Movement Coach, and emerging actor, who creates expressive dance/ movement inspired by personal memories. Her performances often stems from a personal experience or a specific memory that grows into a poetic image that she imbues with the memory. Her venues include Goodman Theatre, Raven Theatre, Chicago Cultural Center, The Athenaeum Theatre, Victory GardenTheatre, MCA, Links Hall, Ruth Page Center for the Arts, Access Living, Out of Site Chicago, Elastic Arts, and many more… She was selected to be one of Chicagoan artists to showcase for Dance/USA 2011 at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago. Wannapa has been part of Laura Crotte’s theatre group to present the “Day of the Death” show for students in Chicago schools. She is a former company member of Erasing the Distance [ETD.]: a documentary theatre exploring mental health. As one of the 4 selected grantees of ETD, she has conceived and produced the performance piece titled: “Through My Daughter’s Eyes” as part of the 2016 PopUp Series for Erasing the Distance by collaborating Theater, and Butoh in the work. Her recent work as a Movement Coach/Choreographer for Collectivo El Pozo theatre group, and Out of Site Chicago to perform in 2018, 2019, Live Streaming in May 2020, and Summer Open-Flow interactive Public performance in collaboration with Chicago Park District in August 2021. She has taught Butoh workshops such as Butoh workshop for actors at Collaboraction Theatre Company, Erasing the Distance [Doc.Fest 2018], Halcyon Theatre, Butoh Body, Chicago Inclusive Dance Festival 2019 [Co-curated by Body Work, Access Living, and Momenta], and individuals artists/actors as part of movement coaching.
Butoh Curious Chi 