American Realness

Michelle Ellsworth

The Rehearsal Artist

Co-Presented by The Invisible Dog Art Center and Gibney Dance

NYC PREMIERE

Tuesday, January 9, 1:15pm, 2:00pm, 2:45pm, 3:30pm, 6:30pm, 7:15pm, 8:00pm, 8:45pm
Wednesday, January 10, 1:15pm, 2:00pm, 2:45pm, 3:30pm, 6:30pm, 7:15pm, 8:00pm, 8:45pm
Thursday, January 11, 1:15pm, 2:00pm, 2:45pm, 3:30pm, 6:30pm, 7:15pm, 8:00pm, 8:45pm

Run Time: 35 minutes
*limited capacity

The Invisible Dog Art Center, 51 Bergen Street, Brooklyn
Single Tickets $25 / Gibney Festival Pass $20 / Standing Room $15

Single Tickets Festival Pass

A small group of audience members surveils a dancer who is simultaneously: 1) watching reenactments of scenes from 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2) participating in a mash-up of some of the most canonical social science experiments of the last 50 years. Occasionally, an eight-foot-high wooden wheel assists dancers as they rotate in the sagittal plane with their nose as the axis. Each rotation tests the viability of the constructed environment the dancers inhabit and allows the audience to reconsider the nature of stability. Knee aprons, one-way surveillance glass, Mormon temple rituals, and a wooden bikini help prepare the audience for shifts in perspective and other revelations related to death.

Performances of The Rehearsal Artist for American Realness 2018 are made possible with support from The Invisible Dog Art Center, Performance Space 122, Gibney Dance and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.

The Rehearsal Artist is a National Performance Network/Visual Artists Network (NPN/VAN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Performance Space 122 in partnership with The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, On The Boards, Women and Their Work, University of Colorado Boulder and NPN. The Creation & Development Fund is supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). For more information: www.npnweb.org Additional support for The Rehearsal Artist was provided in part by The MAP Fund, supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Rehearsal Artist was developed in part by Live Arts Bard at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography at Florida State University, as well as the Center for Humanities in the Arts and IRISS Project Society research funding at the University of Colorado Boulder
Photo by Julieta Cervantes courtesy of Live Arts Bard

Creator: Michelle Ellsworth
Performers: Lauren Beale, Michelle Ellsworth, Ondine Geary, and Jadd Tank
Lighting Designer and Reactive Artist: Ryan Seelig
Sound Design: Max Bernstein
Set Design: Bruce Miller
Flipbook and web programmer: Satchel Spencer
Production Manager: Emily Rea

Though not a licensed scientist, technologist, or carpenter, Michelle Ellsworth nevertheless co-mingles these disciplines with dance in an attempt to choreograph coping strategies and wood-based and web-based solutions to peculiar geopolitical (and personal) phenomena. The pharmaceutical potential of dance, as well as labor-intensive ideas inform her work.

Recent gigs include: Bard’s Fisher Center (2017), Noorderzon Festival (Netherlands 2016), Made in the USA Festival (Greece 2016), On The Boards ( 2015), The Chocolate Factory (2015), American Realness (2015), The Fusebox Festival (2013 and 2015), Brown University (2015), Abandon Normal Devices Festival (Liverpool 2013), and Danspace in New York City (2012).

Among Ellsworth’s honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship (2016), National Performance Network Creation Fund Commission (2016), Doris Duke Impact Award (2015), a NEFA National Dance Project Grant (2014 and 2017), a Creative Capital Fellowship (2013), and a USA Artists Knight Fellowship in Dance (2012).