The LAB will host acclaimed NYC-based choreographer, Luciana Achugar, as an artist-in-residence for one week in February, 2012. Achugar will be working on her new work, FEEL...FORM, which is being developed through a residency at BAX in New York City and will premiere in May at the Abrons Arts Center as a co-production with The Chocolate Factory. Luciana is the recipient of two Bessie Awards for her past work. We are thrilled to have her in Philadelphia working on her latest creation.
FEEL...FORM (or FEELingpleasuresatisfactioncelebrationholyFORM) by Luciana Achugar is a new dance quartet created for 3 dancers and Achugar with award-winning collaborators Michael Mahalchick (sound design), Carrie Wood (lighting design) and Walter Dundervill (costumes). FEEL...FORM is dance as celebration of experience, and of pleasure as the consummation of experience. It embraces carnality while resisting clichés of sexiness/objectification, moving beyond a superficial relationship to pleasure in overtly sexualized bodies prevalent in mass media and culture. Inspired by the 60's psychedelic experience and its quest for enlightened interconnectivity and transcendence through altered states of consciousness, FEEL...FORM’s all-female cast engage in Achugar’s signature durational phrasing multiplying the dancers' movements to create an organic, nature-like form reflecting both rigorous formalism and corporeal excess.
FEEL...FORM will be presented on a proscenium stage, taking advantage of the strong visual framing that such a traditional setting can provide. The goal is to make the form of the dance palpable for the audience, collapsing the difference between “seeing” the dance versus “feeling” the dance, in what is perhaps an impossible task — to make movements that exude such a strong feeling that they evoke the same physiological sensation in the viewer. As in all of Achugar's work, but more articulately so, FEEL...FORM questions a hierarchy that undervalues that which reminds us of our "uncivilized" past, the carnal, the vulnerable, and the impure, and exposes the unavoidability of the body to "arrive" at dancing as an unquestionable act, as catharsis, as celebration. The music, lighting, set and costumes will work together to thoughtfully create a holistic sensorial experience engaging at the purest intuitive level with the audience's mind and body.
While in residence, Luciana will teach two dance technique classes at the LAB. Classes are free. Space is limited so please RSVP to Craig Peterson, LAB Director at craig@livearts-fringe.org to reserve a spot.
Dates: Monday, February 6 & Wednesday, February 8 from 10am — 12pm.
Class Description: Feeling Form
We will connect to a sensual state in our experience of moving through anatomical explorations, connecting the parts of our whole and using imagination and intention to move more fully and with lusciousness. We will dance improvising and learning material from my work, old and new. (Some dance training required)
Luciana Achugar is a Brooklyn based choreographer originally from Montevideo, Uruguay. In 1995 she graduated from CalArts and moved to NYC. There, she danced professionally with several choreographers including Luis Lara, Jeremy Nelson, John Jasperse Company and ChameckiLerner.
She began making work collaboratively with Levi Gonzalez, and in 2002 she started working independently. Since then she has created seven works that have been presented by most venues showing contemporary dance in NYC as well as PS1 Contemporary Art Center; in Cambridge, MA at the Green Street Studios; in Minneapolis at the Walker Art Center and The Southern Theater and in Uruguay at the Festival Iberoamericano de Danza, Teatro Solis and the Centro Cultural de España en Montevideo; and at Portland's Institute of Contemporary Art during their Time-Based Art Festival. achugar has also made several commissioned pieces for Barnard College, George Washington University, The New School and Minneapolis' Zenon Dance Company.
She is one of Dance Magazine’s 2011 "25 to Watch" and in 2010 she was selected for the prestigious Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant. She received two New York Dance BESSIE Awards for choreography; one for PURO DESEO (2010) and the other one for her first full-evening length show Exhausting Love at Danspace Project (2006). In 2009 she received a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council President’s 2009 Liberty Award, and in November 2008 she accepted a Brooklyn Arts Exchange “Passing it on” Award from renowned choreographer Tere O’Connor. Her work has received and continues to receive support from several Foundations, including Creative Residencies from organizations such as Movement Research in NY and the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography in Florida. Achugar was a Brooklyn Arts Exchange Artist in Residence from 2009 to 2011 and is currently their Artist Advisor. She is a 2012 Alpert Award Nominee.
The Live Arts Brewery (LAB) is located at 919 North 5th Street in the Northern Liberties neighborhood of Philadelphia. The LAB is a program for research and development launched in 2009 by the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival. It is the goal of the LAB to provide opportunities for artists to explore, ruminate and discuss processes relevant to the evolution and creation of dance, theater and cross-genre live performance work. Workshop showings, lectures and demonstrations, master classes and community gatherings are a part of ongoing LAB programming.
For more information about the Live Arts Brewery (LAB), LAB Fellows, and the Second Thursdays Series, visit our LAB page.
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