Here & Now 2007! - Carnival Center & Miami Light Project

MIAMI LIGHT PROJECT & CARNIVAL CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS PRESENT
HERE & NOW: 2007!

Miami Light Project and Carnival Center for the Performing Arts continue their collaborative efforts to support the growth and development of Miami artists as they team up once again to present Here & Now: 2007.  A signature commissioning program of Miami Light Project, Here & Now annually offers a platform and venue for South Florida performance and media artists to create and present new work. Carnival Center for the Performing Arts joined Miami Light Project as a commissioning partner in 2005. 

Octavio Campos, Lucia Aratanha and Jojo Corväiá share the program in Here & Now: 2007, offering a week of exciting and provocative performance and multi-media work presented for the first time in Carnival Center's Studio Theater. These artists have created three distinctive and unique productions that represent some of the most wildly intriguing new work being created in South Florida.

Miami Light Project & Carnival Center for the Performing Arts
present
Here & Now: 2007
featuring
Octavio Campos, Lucia Aratanha and Jojo Corväiá
March 28-30, 2007; 8:00pm
Carnival Center for the Performing Arts, Studio Theater
1300 Biscayne Boulevard, Miami, Fl
Tickets $23.00
For tickets call the Carnival Center Box Office at 305.949.6722
or visit www.carnivalcenter.org or www.miamilightproject.com

Parking is available at the Omni Performing Arts Parking Garage and four other conveniently located Carnival Center-authorized lots. Visit www.carnivalcenter.org for map and directions.

PERFORMANCE DESCRIPTION & ARTIST BIOS

Octavio Campos
Kitchen Monkey (Theater)
This 23-minute performance work, which Octavio describes as an "ethno-poetic sonic threat," explores intercultural performance techniques and vocal gymnastics within an urban jungle. Domestic violence, ritual, belly dancing, hip-hop and the human voice collide and tap into basic human behavior in this hybrid of dance, theater and music that encourages audience members to participate actively in the action going on onstage.  This interactive work also integrates the Ketjak, a 2,000-year-old Balinese ritual also known as the "Monkey Chant," performed by a cast of over 40 students from Miami's New World School of the Arts. 

Octavio Campos, a Miami-born Cuban-American choreographer, performance artist and teacher, has been creating risk-taking interdisciplinary performance since 1989 that is constantly surprising, interactive, gently transgressive and ready to face today's serious moral challenges.  After attending SUNY Purchase and the Martha Graham School, he went to Germany to work with Birgitta Trommler and studied dance theater at the Folkwang Schule of Pina Bausch. After an extensive performance and directing career in Europe collaborating within the works of Robert Wilson, Philip Glass and Vivienne Newport, he returned to Miami and founded CAMPOSITION – a multidisciplinary ensemble dedicated to pushing the boundaries between contemporary performance and activism. He has received numerous grants, commissions and awards, most notably from the Miami Light Project, Carnival Center for the Performing Arts, Florida Dance Festival, Miami Dade College, Cirque du Soleil, Teatro Municipal Lima, Klapstuk, Berliner Theater Treffen, The Bolschoi Berlin, State Theater Darmstadt and the Civic Theater Munster. He has served on the faculty of the New World School of the Arts since 1995.

Lucia Aratanha
Swallowing the Moon (Dance)
Swallowing the Moon is a physical theater piece inspired by the short story "Amor," by Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. With motherhood is a central theme, Lucia, through solo dance, takes on the role of a woman on an inward existential journey to discover that her natural female instincts are stronger than what society taught her to be – the perfect mother.  Lucia collaborates with visual and media artists Dinorah Rodriguez, Flor Vrancovich and Carolina Pagani to integrate images and symbols drawn from the pre-patriarchal Sumerian myth of Innana to create a parallel with the images suggested by the writer in an attempt to revisit much of the power and passion of the feminine that is suppressed and left behind by Western culture.

Lucia Aratanha has been a professional dancer, actress and choreographer since 1975 in her native country, Brazil. She has worked extensively with well-known choreographers and directors. Her most notable works in physical theater are her collaborations with award winner Cia dos Atores since 1990. In 2002, she was the choreographer and movement coach for the Brazilian film, Meteoro, directed by Puerto Rican filmmaker Diego de la Texera. In Miami, Lucia collaborated with director and playwright Ricky J. Martinez in Epar (New Theatre, 1997), Concerning Phaedra (Miami Light Project-Here & Now, 1999) and Nest of Scorpions (stage reading, Juggerknot Homegrown Series, 2004). Since 1996 she has performed with Giovanni Luquini Performance Troupe. In 2003, Lucia received the Artist Access Grant to attend intensive 6-week training on Suzuki and Viewpoints at Siti Company in New York. Currently, Lucia Aratanha is collaborating with Gary Lund on the interactive, interdisciplinary performance art installation – Hostages of the Arts: Surrender.

Jojo Corväiá
The Breathing Lessons (Music)
Jojo Corväiá's multi-instrumental music and video installation, The Breathing Lessons investigates sound, voice and breath through a myriad of instruments and experiments with his own voice. The use of seven sources of sound (via strategically placed Ipods) in addition to the live sound coming from a variety of instruments chosen with attention to the visual work and the situation in which they will be presented as part of a new composition facet. In this sense, a live piece works to bring sounds into a new and more immediately dynamic visual relation, creating a compositional outline within which a degree of space exists for immediate and on-site improvisational effects.

Jojo Corväiá was born in 1965 in Caracas, Venezuela. His studies cover the fields of music, architecture and graphic design. Educated at the Masira Grau Music School in Caracas, he was part of the prestigious Scholla Cantorum of Caracas. His early visual work was concerned with geometric forms developed through oversized origami figures, exploring the contextual complexity of paper folding. In his sound work, a dominant element has been the use of digitally processed sounds mixed with real acoustic instruments and voice, exploring the junction between those electronic frequencies, and acoustic instruments that can almost fit into the classification of forgotten. Soft and hushed, almost imperceptible, fragments of sounds that only the human performance can achieve, secluded mistakes, create a complex textural field that merged with the digital media, gives birth to a sound treated with almost a sculptural intention, almost touchable. As a commercial graphic designer and art director for more than 20 years, he had achieved several international recognitions such as two times Cannes Awards, London Festivals, FIAP; four times New York Festivals, and also many ANDA's and one COLATINGRAF.

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