Tool is Loot

SUN JAN 8 . 2:30 PM
MON JAN 9 . 8:00 PM

Run time: 70 minutes

ABRONS ARTS CENTER PLAYHOUSE THEATER
466 Grand Street

For one year, choreographers Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey worked apart, holding tandem projects, in the U.S. and France, respectively. Each artist solicited weeklong encounters with non-dance experts, voluntarily subjecting their aesthetic position to a barrage of assessment, opinions and desires from the “outsiders”, including an astrophysicist, sommelier, architect, film editor, medical supply salesman, kinetic sculptor, baroque opera singer, art critic, acoustician and social activist. Now, as the two choreographers come together in TOOL IS LOOT, the identity of each artist is simultaneously undone and strengthened in a duet that carries the ghosts of aesthetic propositions that are not their own. The opinions and interpretations of composer Jonathan Bepler and lighting designer Thomas Dunn function as yet another clarification and reinterpretation of TOOL IS LOOT.

“…utterly original, deeply comic and deviously beautiful. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that both Ms. Lacey and Mr. Cardona are effortlessly charismatic performers.” – Brian Seibert, The New York Times

A production of WCV, Inc., TOOL IS LOOT is co-commissioned by The Kitchen and EMPAC, Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY. Creation of the work was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and additional funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Boeing Company Charitable Trust; a 2010-2011 Joyce SoHo Creative Residency, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; CNDC Angers and FUSED; Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers with the Département de la Seine-Saint-Denis; Baryshnikov Arts Center; Dance Place (D.C.); Atlantic Center for the Arts; the National Endowment for the Arts; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; and Bossak/Heilbron Charitable Foundation. TOOL IS LOOT was commissioned through the Meet The Composer’s Commissioning Music/USA program.