Hartt School And Real Art Ways Collaborate On Dance Performance, 3/17

The Hartt School Dance Division and Real Art Ways (RAW) collaborate to present a dance performance by Hartt students as part of Saya Woolfalk's RAW installation Institute of Empathy, which runs through March 20, 2011. The performance will be part of the creative cocktail hour on Thursday, March 17, 2011, which takes place from 6:00 PM to 10:00 PM. Admission is $10, $5 for RAW members. For details, visit http://www.realartways.org/visualarts.htm#woolfalk.

Visitors may view open dance rehearsals with Woolfalk and Hartt's dancers in the RAW galleries Sunday, January 23; Sunday, February 13; and Sunday, March 13. All rehearsals are from 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM. Admission to these rehearsals is free, though RAW suggests a $3 donation in support of the galleries. Hartt dance graduate Jessica Kilpatrick choreographed the piece, which she will perform with current dance students Anna Massiero and Jillian Greenberg.

Woolfalk draws material a variety of visual sources. In the artist's own words, "I use art as a laboratory to catalogue and critique our socio-visual landscape. Combining performance, sculpture, painting, and video, my installations investigate and playfully re-imagine the representational systems that hierarchically shape our lives. My art is an experimental ground where I create alternative bodies, environments, and consciousnesses. A black, white, and Japanese woman, my work is inspired by ethnographic, feminist, and psychoanalytic theory. I spent two years going back and forth between Brazil and the United States and traveled to Japan in the fall of 2008. All three countries have had an enormous influence on my practice. My sketches are a notational system; from them, I make paintings that recombine texts, images, and objects. From the two-dimensional I move to the three-dimensional and create landscapes. Through performance and video I activate those landscapes and produce narrative."

Real Art Ways is located at 56 Arbor St., Hartford, CT 06106. For tickets or for more information, visit www.realartways.org or call 860.232.1006.

For more information about Saya Woolfalk and her work, visit http://homepage.mac.com/sayawoolfalk/index.html.