High Concept Labs & Monira Foundation Presents Maggie Bridger | SCALE

High Concept Labs (HCL), a Chicago-based arts service organization and artist incubator, is pleased to premiere Scale, a dance work directed, choreographed and performed by HCL 2023 Fellow Artist in Residence, Maggie Bridger with the support of Monira Foundation. This multifaceted performance uses and reimagines pain through the creative process, applying disability aesthetics, and will be presented at High Concept Labs, 2233 S Throop Street, Suite #401 in Chicago on May 13 - May 14, 2023.

Collaborators include dancers Robby Williams, Alex Neil-Sevier, Joán Joel, and Jordan Brown, Reveca Torres (visual art/lighting and costume design), Shireen Hamza (sound), and crafters Margaret Fink, Sandy Guttman, Alison Kopit, and Ashley Miller. Joán Joel and Jordan Brown will also be providing Artistic Sign Language.

Using the pain scale as a primary source material, Scale places medicalized methods of quantifying pain in conversation with alternative ways of reading and attending to pain emerging from the disability community, ultimately proposing new ways of caring for the bodymind in dance.

"We often think of pain as an extraordinarily individual experience, but both the disability community and the dance community have long developed generative and beautiful practices of reading and attending to one another's pain," says Maggie Bridger.

Complex interactions between medicalization, care, and community are explored through movement, video, and the use of access tools for both performers and audience members. Scale works with "an extraordinarily broad and aspirational definition of access. Access tools inform the movement as much as the movement informs the access tools. The access tools are as much a part of the piece as any other aspect." says Maggie Bridger.

Scale poses questions around the ways that we perceive pain, ultimately reaching toward a more compassionate and disability-informed way of creating and performing dance. Each performance is followed by a Crafting Care event post-talk with the opportunity for audience members to join in the crafting practice that informed much of the work of Scale.

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