Chris Schlichting Comes to The Chocolate Factory Theater

The Chocolate Factory Theater (www.chocolatefactorytheater.org) concludes its Twelfth Anniversary season with the New York premiere of Period, a new performance by Chris Schlichting, co-presented with Lumberyard Contemporary Performing Arts. Tickets are $20 and may be purchased in advance at (212) 352-3101 or www.chocolatefactorytheater.org.

"Schlichting has a sophisticated way of shaping space. With moving bodies, he can suggest invisible rooms within rooms. Over this firm geometry he drapes wishy-washy gesticulations, generating tension between rigor and lassitude." - The New Yorker In Period, Chris Schlichting's prolific, obsessive movement generation dispenses with preciousness and patterns to hammer out a Rosetta Stone to leave behind for the next, better world. Small tectonic collisions create a dense choreographic landscape in the spareness of the Chocolate Factory, and the dancers fasten themselves to intricate, churning movement in their slide toward extinction. Period is about letting go but not before exhausting every ounce of love one has left for dance.

Choreography: Chris Schlichting.
Performances: Tristan Koepke, Laura Selle Virtucio, and Maggie Zepp.
Lighting Design: Heidi Eckwall.

Chris Schlichting's residency at The Chocolate Factory received generous support from the McKnight Choreographer Fellowship program, administered by The Cowles Center for Dance and the Performing Arts and funded by the McKnight Foundation, and from LUMBERYARD Contemporary Performing Arts (www.lumberyard.org).

Chris Schlichting is the recipient of a 2015 McKnight Choreographers Fellowship (www.mcknightdancechoreo.org) and was the inaugural awardee of Lumberyard's Solange MacArthur Award for New Choreography in 2014. The development of Period was made possible, in part, by the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography at Florida State University. Chris Schlichting is a Minnesota-based choreographer, performer, and dance enthusiast. Interested in the formality of structural investigation and the emotion of earnest expression, his dances traverse from the grotesque to the sublime, from delicate intimate moments to grand spectacles. Schlichting develops dances untethered to thematic and conceptual frameworks, allowing choreographic process to develop focus through its own intuitive and sensory logic.

LUMBERYARD Contemporary Performing Arts, based in New York City and led by Executive and Artistic Director Adrienne Willis, is a national non-profit organization that serves the performing arts community and its audiences by providing multi-faceted opportunities for artists to develop new work. Unwavering in its commitment to assisting artists throughout the creative process, LUMBERYARD operates with a collaborative and generous spirit, one driven by this support for artists and appreciation for the audiences who value their work. In addition to providing critical support to a wide range of artists, LUMBERYARD welcomes audiences of all experience levels into the inner world of the contemporary performing arts, giving them opportunities to witness the creation, as well as the performance, of new work. Among LUMBERYARD's varied and ever-expanding offerings are its acclaimed residency program; its LUMBERYARD in the City Winter Festival; and the Solange MacArthur Award for New Choreography.

LUMBERYARD's four-building facility on the Hudson River waterfront will make a significant contribution to the revitalization of Catskill, New York. The complex consists of a main Lumberyard building in Catskill and three large adjacent barns along Catskill Creek. There will be a large, column-free, flexible theater, a lobby, administrative offices, housing for up to 20 resident artists, an artist lounge and a public courtyard. Phase II will encompass the three adjacent structures, which LUMBERYARD will develop in collaboration with the Village of Catskill and in line with the Village's Downtown and Waterfront Revitalization Strategy. Each year in Catskill, LUMBERYARD will present a summer season consisting of premiere and work-in-progress performances by celebrated professional artists and companies, serving local residents and attracting tourists from across New York and beyond. From October through April, the facility will be available for collaborative residencies, subsidized and commercial rentals and community programming. Information about the Summer 2018 "Under Construction Festival" can be found at lumberyard.org.

The Chocolate Factory Theater exists to encourage and support artists in their process of inquiry. We engage specifically with a community of artists who challenge themselves and, in doing so, challenge us. We believe that by supporting the labor of these artists, we contribute to elevating New York City as a thriving marketplace of ideas. The Chocolate Factory embraces artistic practice as an integral part of the artist's whole life, an essential component of the life of our community and a key element of a larger national and international artistic dialog. As such, we host artists as our equal partners with shared autonomy, trust and appreciation. While we seek to make big ideas and extended relationships possible, we commit to working at a small, intimate and personal scale, with few artistic compromises or boundaries. We achieve all of this by creating a vessel for artistic experimentation through a residency package serving the whole artist - salary, space, responsive and flexible support for the development of new work from inspiration to presentation.