Elaine Lemieux and Sara Zalek Friday, May 17 at 6:30 PM Free
Berger Park Cultural Center 6205 N Sheridan Road, Chicago IL
Mooove Voice combines classical vocal techniques with fundamental Butoh exercises, exploring the physical sensations of vocal sounds in our bodies and in the space around us. We work up to group improvisational scores by playfully passing sound and movement in simple patterns. No experience necessary, all are welcome!
RSVP now to ensure a spot. Walk-ins are encouraged as well; if we are at capacity, you will be placed first for the next event. Mooove Voice will last 90 minutes. As with all Roman Susan events, this event is free at no cost to participants. The movement space at Berger Park is on the third floor of the building, up two flights of stairs. You will need to remove shoes to enter the space. Parking is limited in the area – CTA and ride share encouraged! Please leave feedback in the RSVP form if these factors present any obstacles or concerns that would prevent you from joining us.
Each two hour workshop starts with connecting our focused attention to our breath and bodies. We warm our vocal chords using gentle repetition of constants, vowels, and classic vocal exercises. We use imagery and release techniques from the Butoh (contemporary dance) world to loosen our everyday body and open more playful aspects of ourselves.
Through games and simple improvisational structures, we practice listening to one another, exploring vocal improvisation and playfully passing sound and movement.
Hot Mess! highlights moments of co-creation and gives the artists and the audience a play-space to meet each other across time, genre, cultures, perspective, experience.. it demonstrates the power of working together in the unknown, possibilities for Queering space, and the beauty in transformation while making art! All ages are invited to come witness these artists in person at Elastic or stream it online from home. This is a family friendly environment, so we invite you to bring the kids! We are especially pleased this Episode to welcome in person ASL interpretation by Olivia Ginn.
Episode 10 on Saturday, October 28 Two sets: 4:20pm & 8:00pm Central Standard Time
Featured Esteemed Artist bios: Hereaclitus: In 87′ they met and collaborated with Linda Montano. Inspiring 2 decades of ART/LIFE biodynamic art.
Fabulous Freddie: Freddie’s dance journey is a self-exploration and healing practice in claiming himself whole through embodying his masculine and feminine energies as a Black Gay artist. By choosing to express himself through both Breaking and Vogue Femme movement foundations, he has opened a new space for an important conversation to happen through his body.
Mabel Kwan & Andrew Tham as MEGA LAVERNE & SHIRLEY is a band birthed from the fictitious art scene known as big TEEN. big TEEN bands revel in aesthetics of distraction, multiplicity, and metatheatrics. MEGA LAVERNE & SHIRLEY embrace this artistic framework with monolithic performances that incorporate synthesizers, MIDI sampling, multilingual declamations, choreography informed by Chinese calligraphy, and LED light worship. That is, MEGA LAVERNE & SHIRLEY attempt to overwhelm the audience in the hopes of bringing them into a new kind of focus; a kind of transcendence through multiplicity and confusion. It’s like witnessing a monumental event happen in two parallel universes simultaneously, or watching an episode of Laverne & Shirley in two languages.
Karyna Herrera: For me, art and culture are life companions. As an artist, I enjoy working in the areas of performance, photography, video and art research. Space and time are used consciously in my work. The starting point for my artistic work is usually personal observation and reflection on social and political events. At the same time, I am concerned with the question of the transience and continued existence of things, nature and humanity. In addition to time, space plays a central role in my artistic work. I want my experiences and feelings in space and time to be manifested in my works of art. Especially when I make performance art, I have to be able to create an immediate connection between myself and the space and convey this atmospherically to the viewer. I also find it exciting how traces left behind (relics) from a performance can themselves become art objects and take on a symbolic character. For me, these traces are part of the work of art.
In Lucerne I studied at the University of Art and Design and earned a master’s degree in art in public spaces. My acting studies complement my professional career. I have already taken part in several exhibitions and am active in various performance events. As a curator and co-organizer of performance events, I was active in the ((Ort)) studio until December 2018 in collaboration with Judith Huber and Silvia Isenschmid. “Make-Art-Happening” is my new project as a curator and organizer of exhibitions.
Aurora Tabar is a performing artist, occupational therapist, and multi-tasking mom. Her professional and creative practices examine the process of healing and the potential for transformation. Most recently Aurora had the pleasure of collaborating with members of WATCHTOWER (Rosé Hernandez, Ginger Krebs, Bryan Saner, and Sara Zalek) during a residency at Roman Susan Gallery. Aurora has presented solo and collaborative performances across Chicago including at Elastic Arts Foundation, Prop Theater, Links Hall, and High Concept Laboratories. As a special educator, Aurora is committed to inclusion and helping students build functional skills that they can carry into the future. She lives on the west side of Chicago with her partner, two adorable kiddos, and a cohort of cats.
Iván Espinosa is a Latino choreographer and interdisciplinary scholar that writes about and creates work engaged with mycology, climate change, interspecies performance, and Japanese Butoh. Iván is currently a PhD student in Performance Studies at the University of Colorado. Iván has presented his ecology-themed artwork nationwide at venues such as La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York, Seattle International Butoh Festival and numerous academic conferences. Iván began his formative artistic training in Seattle with Pacific Northwest Butoh pioneer Joan Laage, who continues to serve as his foremost mentor and collaborator to this day. Since graduating from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Iván’s artwork has been focused on studying the relationships between human bodies and mycelium fungi networks through the lenses of bioacoustics and site-specific performance. His recent multimedia installations involving mushrooms and mycelium bioacoustics were highlighted in a special issue of the PERFORMANCE RESEARCH journal titled “On Dark Ecologies.”
Hot Mess! cruise director Sara Zalek is a maker of situations and curious objects.They create performances as learning and listening situations to encourage thoughtful interpersonal connections. They enjoy wearing many hats. Zalek skillfully performs in both in person and online situations; in 2022 named an Esteemed Artist by The City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE). They have performed, curated workshops and produced citywide festivals at the Chicago Cultural Center, Elastic Arts, Experimental Sound Studio, High Concept Labs, Links Hall, Japanese Culture Center, CoProsperity Sphere, No Nation, dfbrl8r, Outerspace, and UrbanGuild in Tokyo, LightBox in Detroit, Arts+ Lit Lab in Madison, WI, B74 Raum für Kunst in Lucerne Switzerland, and many more.
Supported in part by Elastic Arts. 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.
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.
Open Broadcaster Software LIVE Improvising Environment Saturday, March 5, 2022 @Elastic Arts 3429 W Diversey Ave #208
TWO SETS IRL and live streaming 4:20pm & 8:pm CST
Featuring: Yumiko Yoshioka @yumiko-yoshioka (virtually from Tokyo) Charles Joseph Smith @charlessmith702210 Carole McCurdy @carolemccurdy Kikù Hibino @kiku.hibino [️] pronounced “Hypothetical Star”: M_m<M and nulltopia @mmmtvdotnet
For each set we invited a live audience and live-streamed online. In person audience size depends on Covid conditions, you must be vaccinated and wear a mask inside Elastic Arts.
This series focuses on the moments of co-creation and gives the artists a playful space to discover new ways of working together and interacting with the audience. The performance itself demonstrates the power of working together in the unknown, possibilities for Queering space, and the beauty in re-starting while making art!
️] pronounced “Hypothetical Star”: M_m<M and nulltopia @mmmtvdotnet
Butoh Curious Chi 