The Tank Presents New Works: Lydia Bell & Lindsay Benedict/ Kathleen Kelley

The Tank: home for emerging arts presents "New Works: Lydia Bell & Lindsay Benedict/Kathleen Kelley" Thursday, March 04, 2010; 9:30pm - $12, Friday, March 05, 2010; 9:30pm - $12

The Tank is located at 354 W. 45th Street, New York, NY 10036, to get there take the A, C, E, to 42nd Street; 1, 2, 3, S, 7 to Time Square

Witness

Choreography: Kathleen Kelley/Labor Force Dances
Performers: Kuan-Yu Chen, Austin Dixon, Jessica Jolly, & Anne Lazovik
Music: Sammy Gallo

Witness, a new quartet choreographed by Kathleen Kelley/Labor Force Dances, is an investigation inside female friendships. Through dynamic movement, physical connection, and the personalities of all four performers, Witness asks, "How do we support each other, how do we reflect each other, how do we harm each other?"

The impetus for the creation of Witness came from movement studies with the dancers, writings on the integral roles women play in our lives, and Kathleen Kelley's own experiences with strong, important, life-changing kind of women.

He Who Blinks First (with boys)

Choreography: Lydia Bell & Lindsay Benedict
Performers: Jack Reilly & Ben Monnie

A collaborative choreographic exploration of trying to be the same, and failing. Through simple gestures and interactions, He Who Blinks First (with boys) expresses the limitations of knowing or understanding another person- can we ever be more than a witness to someone else's experience? Dancers Reilly and Monnie re-perform the series of movements that Bell and Benedict created during the original investigation: the same piece on different bodies. The new duet plays with the notion of imitation and the perseverance of individuality.

KATHLEEN KELLEY, co-artistic director/choreographer of Labor Force Dances, trained with the Raleigh School of Ballet, North Carolina School of the Arts, and graduated Summa Cum Laude from UNC-Greensboro. Her choreography has been shown at several venues in North Carolina, South Carolina, and New York, including Triskelion Arts (WAXworks), Durham Arts Council, Saint Mary's School (Raleigh, NC), The Wellness Center for the Arts (Durham, NC), and Coker College (Hartsville, SC). In addition to choreographing for Labor Force Dances, Kathleen performs with Israeli choreographer Deganit Shemy and Malaysian choreographer Mei Yin Ng/Mei-BE whatever.

Video of excerpt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaHVZRQaj1s
Website: www.laborforcedances.com
Blog: laborforcedances.wordpress.com
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/22624022@N07/sets/72157606350522675/

LYDIA BELL is a dance artist based in Ridgewood, Queens. She grew up in Portland, Oregon and graduated from Wesleyan University in 2007 with a BA in Dance and Classics. Her work investigates the emotional lives of bodies and places through the choreography of domestic situations, actions, and objects. In 2008 she was included in a group show "Maximum Perception: Contemporary Brooklyn Performance" at English Kills Art Gallery. She has also shown work in New York at Envoy Enterprises, Eyelevel Gallery, Pier 36 Arts Festival, Triskelion Arts, AUNTS, Green Space, Bushwick Open Studios, and Arts Cure Center. In 2009 she was a recipient of a FEAST (Funding Emerging Art with Sustainable Tactics) grant. Recently she collaborated with artist Gabi Schillig on "Beneath the Skin," an urban intervention with wearable textile objects. Lydia has also worked with Kim Root, Clarinda Mac Low and Eiko & Koma. Currently she is serving as coordinator for the Eiko & Koma Retrospective Project.

Through film, performance, and various media LINDSAY BENEDICT presents us with fragments and gestures that examine and question social relations. In her work, affect and raw emotion are often deployed to disrupt and destabilize any simple reading of human connections. A wide ranging temporality, from more deliberate and slowly conceived films and sewn texts to the more immediately gestural drawings allow a dense layering of material and narrative to unravel and intertwine simultaneously. Lindsay Benedict was born in Port Jefferson, New York, and currently lives in Brooklyn. She received a BA from Williams College, an MFA from UC Berkeley and was a recent studio fellow the Whitney Independent Study Program. Benedict has recently shown at Bose Pacia and PS 122 in Manhattan, in the Movement Research 2009 Spring Festival, the Berkeley Art Museum, and in the Emergency Biennial; she has screened at the Detroit Museum of New Art (MONA), New Langton Arts in San Francisco, and the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, CA.

NEW WORKS presents the new work of emerging choreographers and facilitates dialogue through feedback sessions and Q&A. New Works is curated by Alexandra Albrecht and Jeso O'Neill.

$10 student tickets will be available at the door.

Presale tickets:
http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/100155

About The Tank
Founded in 2003, The Tank is a non-profit arts presenter whose mission is to provide a welcoming, creative, collaborative, and affordable environment for artists and activists engaged in the pursuit of new ideas. Through a wide range of low-cost, high-concept arts and public affairs programming, The Tank seeks to cultivate a new generation of audience for live performance, civic discourse, and the work of emerging artists.