Liss Fain Dance to Present World Premiere of TACIT CONSENT in San Francisco, 5/5

In association with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Liss Fain Dance has announced the world premiere of TACIT CONSENT, an immersive performance installation with sound design and score by Dan Wool. Additional collaborators include installation designer Matthew Antaky and costume designer Mary Domenico. Tacit Consent runs Thursday, May 5 through Sunday, May 8 at the Forum at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Tickets are $20 to $35, and may be purchased online at tickets.ybca.org.

For Tacit Consent, choreographer Liss Fain invited composer and longtime collaborator Wool to initiate the artistic process "by designing a sound environment in which the audience experiences the sound differently as they move through space." Antaky's installation design and Fain's choreography are a response to Wool's concept.

"The challenge for the composer is to create an environment with distinct areas," says Fain. "Although the model of having the music precede the choreography is more traditional in dance, in this instance we are deliberately inverting the process we used last year in A Space Divided. There, the visual design served as the point of origin and key for the movement and the music."

In Tacit Consent, Antaky is creating a floor plan divided into four distinct rooms. Unlike any of Liss Fain Dance's previous installations, the partitions between the rooms will be opaque, thus requiring the audience to circulate between them to see the dancers within.

"Because it will be impossible for members of the audience to see everything," continues Fain, "Tacit Consent is as much about what one doesn't see as what one does. One of the questions we're exploring concerns the activity of inference: how do we make sense of what we don't see and don't know, based on the evidence of what we have seen? How do our preconceptions, what we already believe, influence this process?"

Underscoring the theme of knowledge and perception will be a shifting array of live-feed video projections designed by Antaky. "In a way that's perhaps more explicit than in any of my previous installation works, we're turning the audience's gaze back onto itself. The watcher is also the watched."

Dancers in Tacit Consent include Sonja Dale, Katharine Hawthorne, Megan Kurashige, Shannon Kurashige, Cassie Martin and Sarah Dionne Woods. The installation for Tacit Consent will be open May 5 - 8 during YBCA's daytime gallery hours. On Saturday, May 7, Liss Fain Dance will host a free lecture demonstrationwith the artistic collaborators and dancers. This event will take place at 4:00 pm in the YBCA Forum. For more information visit lissfaindance.org.

ABOUT LISS FAIN DANCE

Liss Fain Dance (LFD) tours nationally and internationally with work for proscenium stages and performance installations. The company has performed and taught at festivals and venues in Poland, Germany, Belarus, Russia and the UK, as well as colleges, universities, festivals and presenting organizations in the US. In addition, LFD performs in free outreach events throughout the Bay Area.

LFD has collaborated with numerous composers, lighting and set designers, videographers, actors and technologists. In recent years the company has focused its energy in creating performance installations that bring the audience inside the set and close to the performers. Non-narrative, highly structured and emotionally resonant, her work fuses modern dance's forceful energy with the kinetic precision of ballet. Since its founding in Boston in 1988, LFD has premiered over 45 works by Fain and collaborated with individuals and creative organizations that include MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies, The Exploratorium and The Apple Multimedia Lab.

LFD was one of four US companies invited to perform at Internationale Tanzmesse NRW. The company's site-specific work has been sponsored by Amerika Haus for a performance installation at the prestigious Beck & Eggeling Gallery in Dusseldorf, Germany; The Brower Center, Berkeley, CA; Theater Artaud, San Francisco, CA; and Mobius Theater, Boston, MA. In addition to these venues, the company has performed at and been presented by, among others: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Z Space, Powerhouse Arena, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Mill Valley Library, West Wave Dance Festival, ODC Theater, Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, Open Look Contemporary Dance Festival in Russia, Silesian Dance Festival, Zawirowania Festival, the US Embassy, Contemporary Dance Forum in Poland, Belaya Vezha International Theater Festival, Minsk Philharmonic Society and Grodno Drama Theater in Belarus, California State Summer School of the Arts, International Computer Music Conference, Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, Downtown Dance Festival, NYC, Dance Umbrella Boston, Harvard University, University of Massachusetts, Colby College, Clark University and the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT.

In addition to its busy performance schedule, LFD conducts an outreach and education program to provide opportunities for middle and high school students from a broad spectrum of communities to combine dance and movement with creative writing. By working with Fain and company members, students expand their creativity, imagination, and ability to communicate and interpret both abstract and concrete ideas through movement and writing.

ABOUT DAN WOOL

Originally from St. Louis, Missouri, Dan Wool is a San Francisco-based composer who has worked in New York, Los Angeles, London and Mexico City creating scores for more than 45 feature film and broadcast television projects, including seven films for celebrated cult filmmaker Alex Cox (Repo Man, Sid & Nancy). He is perhaps best known as the principal composer in the soundtrack-group Pray for Rain. Wool has worked extensively in creating sound and music for international and domestic advertising and also as sound designer for short films and documentaries, including several for the BBC and Channel 4 (UK). As a music producer and engineer, Wool has collaborated with international artists such as Bernie Worrell (Parliament-Funkadelic); Philip Chevron and James Fearnley (The Pogues); Debra Harry (Blondie); and many Bay Area artists, including All My Pretty Ones, Essence, The Mermen, and Kally Price. Wool has been commissioned to create scores and sound design compositions for The Architecture + Design Museum (L.A.), AXIS Dance Company, Liss Fain Dance, RAWdance, choreographer Sonsherée Giles, and The Tea Dancers/Ballet de la Compasión. He has also worked as a sound engineer and designer on dance compositions with composer Beth Custer (Joe Goode and Jo Kreiter), composer Rob Reich (Circus Bella, Gaucho, Tin Hat). In October of 2010 Wool performed in composer Jem Finer's Longplayer installation, sponsored by the Longnow Foundation at YBCA. In 2013 Wool's score for AXIS Dance Company's Full of Words was nominated for an Isadora Duncan Dance Award for outstanding achievement in music and sound.