Elastic City Presents Todd Shalom's FABSTRACTIONS Walks, 8/21, 23 & 28

Elastic City, the innovative conceptual walks organization, presents Fabstractions, an evening walk near and inside Prospect Park by poet and Elastic City founding director Todd Shalom. In Fabstractions, participants will use poetic techniques to create abstract responses to found imagery on the walk, crafting solos, duets and collective performances as they go. The group will construct a dance that glows, a light-play from car reflections, fresh dirt theatre and a waterfall sonata.

Elastic City will offer Fabstractions August 21, 23 and 28 at 8:30 P.M. Participants will meet outside of 43 Lincoln Road in Brooklyn, and may bring a still or video camera. Light will be provided. Fabstractions will be held in English, but Shalom also speaks Spanish. This walk holds 10 people and lasts approximately 90 minutes. Admission, $20, can be purchased at www.elastic-city.org.

Todd Shalom works with text, sound and image to re-contextualize the body in space using vocabulary of the everyday. As the founding director of Elastic City, he not only leads his own walks, but also collaborates with artists to lead joint walks and works with artists in a variety of disciplines to adapt their expertise to the participatory walk format. He often collaborates with performance artist/director Niegel Smith. Together, they conceive and stage interactive performances in public and private environments.

His work has been presented by organizations such as Abrons Art Center, Creative Time, ISSUE Project Room, The Kitchen, The New Museum and Printed Matter. Shalom is a graduate of the MFA Writing Program at California College of the Arts. He also holds a B.S. in Business Administration from Boston University. Currently, Shalom is a Visiting Instructor in the Writing department at Pratt Institute, where he teaches "The Walk as Poem." For more on him: www.toddshalom.com.

Elastic City is now in its third season of presenting conceptual and poetic walks by artists throughout and outside of New York. With this season, over 50 artists will have led walks.

Todd Shalom, a New York native, devised Elastic City while traveling in Peru and founded the organization in 2010. Having worked in a variety of artistic genres (poetry, sound and performance), he decided to expand upon his existing repertoire of sensory-based walks and commission other artists to lead walks in their own disciplines. Elastic City walks explore various planes of human sensory and aesthetic experience, such as dance, architecture, poetry, sound art, the paranormal and ritualistic performance.

Elastic City just launched its educational program, beginning with a series of “ways.” Whereas a walk offers the opportunity to participate in a narrative series of poetic moments, "ways" are experiential workshops that explicitly engage participants in *how* to generate these moments through exercises, tools and techniques offered by Elastic City artists. In a "way," participants gather in an intimate group to prompt exchange, tone the gut and sharpen poetic decision-making. Elastic City ways typically do not involve walking and are offered outdoors unless otherwise noted.

Elastic City has partnered with numerous organizations to co-present its walks/ways, including Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Brooklyn Flea, Friends of the High Line, Le Petit Versailles, Museum of the City of New York, NY Art Book Fair, Open House NY, Pratt Institute, Residency Unlimited, SculptureCenter, Wave Hill, and Urban Design Week.

Each walk & way lasts approximately 75-120 minutes and costs $20 on average. Payment for walks & ways can be made on-site or via the Elastic City website at http://www.elastic-city.org.

Elastic City is a non-profit organization awaiting 501c3 status and is currently fiscally sponsored by Flux Factory.