SCUBA Brings Dance To Southern Theater With Schlichting, Anderson 5/15, 5/16

SCUBA Touring Network is paving the way for mobilizing dance in America. Now in its seventh year, the annual showcase provides a rare opportunity to see dance artists from around the country on the verge of national visibility.

Founded by Velocity Dance Center of Seattle in conjunction with ODC Theater in San Francisco and the Southern Theater in Minneapolis, SCUBA Touring Network is a cooperative enterprise aiming to share the distinct visions of regionally established, nationally emerging dance artists with new audiences. Each year, a panel of local dance experts chooses an artist from each metropolitan region to represent the strength and invention of emerging talent in the area, presenting 20-30 minutes of ambitious new work. In 2007, Philadelphia Dance Projects joined the Network, further extending the geographic and aesthetic reaches of the program.

Since 2002, SCUBA's co-operative approach has demonstrated the successes of a new model for presenting dance at the national level. Committed to grassroots efforts at mobilizing talent, SCUBA provides the opportunity for choreographers and performers to extend the life of pieces that would typically, after weeks of meticulous construction, only to play to a weekend's worth of audiences. The name for the touring program, in fact, comes from the idea that the Network provides the "air" for artists to dive into a whole new sea of possibilities. SCUBA's goal of supporting emerging talents beyond their initial success has received praise and support from the National Endowment for the Arts and has convincingly "demonstrated the breadth of choreographic invention around the country..." (Camille LeFevre, Star Tribune).

Dylan Skybrook, Director of Dance Programming at the Southern Theater, lauds both the chance for Minneapolis' Chris Schlichting to share his work with a national audience and to welcome new points of view to the Twin Cities dance terrain. "SCUBA is great," he says, "because it's a conversation that happens across choreography and geography. It's wonderful that the Southern can facilitate that."

This year's Minneapolis SCUBA performances feature three artists from particularly diverse backgrounds and influences. Minneapolis choreographer Chris Schlichting presents love things, which premiered at the Southern Theater in 2008 as part of the Momentum: New Dance Works series, a co-commission of the Southern and Walker Art Center. In it, he explores lush spheres of memory and pop culture with leaps through an array of American dance heritages. 

Philadelphia-based Charles O. Anderson's dance theatre X incorporates African-derived movement and political subversion to investigate the echoes of racial stereotypes and the effects of globalization in TAR and World Headquarters.
In the regional premiere of Milk Traces, Shinichi Iova-Koga, "a young maverick artist so gifted that audiences seem to discover him through natural buzz about his talent" (San Francisco Chronicle), draws on Eastern and contemporary dance dialects to depict the kinetic outline of birth.
Performances:

May 15 & 16, 2009

Fri. & Sat. at 8pm

Opening night pre-show reception at 7pm, sponsored by vita.mn and The Red Stag SupperClub

Post-show discussion Sat. May 16
Tickets: $20

Southern Theater box office: 612.340.1725

1420 Washington Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN 55454

www.southerntheater.org
Performance Program
From Minneapolis

Chris Schlichting

love things

"full of hilarious, touching and intriguing choreography....delivered with a singular virtuosity." -

MinnPost.com
Drawing from a wide variety of dance styles, Schlichting's playful movement speaks in the gestures of memory. A choreographic fantasy built and de-constructed from 1970's Americana, this re-working of Momentum 2008's love things slips through streams of vernacular and formal dance, Top 40 songs, treasured objects, and memories of an awkward and clumsy childhood.

From Philadelphia

Charles O. Anderson/dance theatre X

TAR and World Headquarters
"Charles O. Anderson's politicized and poetic voice reaches out to touch us all." - Dance Magazine
Charles O. Anderson's Philadelphia-based theatre X brings grounded and spiritually driven African-derived movement to sleek urban and contemporary dance. With the Twin Cities premieres of TAR and World Headquarters, Anderson presents two meaningful dance works that push toward the most beautiful edges of revolution.
From San Francisco

inkBoat

Milk Traces
"It will make you think and feel and contemplate the paradoxes of life - which is what good theater, and good butoh, can do." - San Franscisco Chronicle
Shinichi Iova-Koga (A.K.A.: momoio) founded inkBoat in 1998, a performance company built by and with the collaborative efforts of choreographers, dancers, musicians, visual artists, directors and actors. Working in fractured, filmic, delicate and decayed environments, inkBoat's performance style is a hybrid of traditional and experimental movement forms woven with physical theater and Japanese butoh dance.