Pivot Arts presents What’s Next: Anna Martine Whitehead
Shannon Stewart & Aurora Nealand
Thursday, June 7 at 7pm
The Mundelein Center at Loyola University
1020 W. Sheridan Road
$15 advance / tickets at the door by $15 suggested donation
Tara Aisha Willis
Associate Curator of Performance, MCA Chicago
leads a conversation with the artists following their performances
Join us for a preview of works-in-progress from our Performing Arts Incubator Program at Loyola University. The Incubator Program provides artists with the necessary time and space to develop work that blurs the boundaries between music, dance, theater, and other arts.
Choreographer and dancer Anna Martine Whitehead premieres Notes On Territory, a transdisciplinary movement piece framed in the guise of a PowerPoint presentation on the history of containment architecture—prison, fort, public housing, and cathedral architecture. Beyond movement, her work uses video, sound, and lighting to create a 4D installation space housing the lectern of the dancing body. Central to Territory is a sense of language-play and translation. Transposing gothic cathedral and colonial fort architecture onto heartland American modernist buildings and prisons, it endeavors to expose the global, colonial, and imperial nature of these structures through intended and unintended mistranslation.
New Orleans-based artists Shannon Stewart (choreographer/dancer) and Aurora Nealand (composer/musician) present Hysteria and the Body Electric. A movement opera, Hysteria focuses thematically on the concepts (and realities) of gendered movement, gendered sound, and media messaging in contemporary American culture. Together, they explore how popular media (television, news, social media) portray and affect our ideas of intimacy, vulnerability and identities.
An established bandleader, composer, performer and improviser, Aurora Nealand is a prominent force in the New Orleans music scene. She is most recognized for her performance on saxophones, clarinet and vocals and has been at the forefront of the revival of New Orleans Traditional Jazz amongst the younger generation of the city’s musicians. Nealand was voted one of Downbeat Magazine’s top ten rising stars for soprano saxophone in 2010.
Shannon Stewart has for many years focused her work on the performativity of race and gender, mingling queer theory and sexuality studies with modes of training that make the physical body a site of research and possible intervention. Both Stewart and Nealand are interested in the intersections of sound and movement to create familiar gendered images and gestures that can be subverted, examined, and recontextualized.
Get a FESTIVAL PASS and see three shows for only $40!