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Program Three
Friday & Saturday, March 16 & 17, 8pm
Sunday, March 18, 7pm
$15 ($10 students/seniors)
Series pass $45 ($30 students/seniors)
Post-show talkback Friday, March 16
HIJACK - HIJACK’s Half
With guest choreographer Sheldon B. Smith
HIJACK is the choreographic collaboration of Kristin Van
Loon and Arwen Wilder. They both grew up in and around Chicago,
met at Colorado College in 1990, and have created over 30 dances
since moving to Minneapolis in 1993. The choreographic duo has now
split to create HIJACK'S Half, with Van Loon and
Wilder separately making duets for the other and a superstar guest:
including Scott Heron, Morgan Thorson, and Sheldon B. Smith. They
made dances about male figure skaters, postal mail, circles, and
spying. Watching Speculum is like watching television through
someone else's window; it is a spy falling in love with their subject.
Johnny Weir is a ballet set to 20 songs by polka songstresses
Lady Hard On with delicate handholds. Serve or Be Served
suggests that the male figure skater is a unique gender and that
walking in circles for a year will bring the dancers glory. In
which Ruthie, Iris, and Betty Ann wait as the waters rise up around
them and Ruthie cannot take a drink of water without remembering
that the eye of the lake is her grandmother's is the final
duet of this show.
HIJACK have performed
at over 50 venues since moving to Minneapolis in 1993. HIJACK is
a regular guest at top Minneapolis dance venues (Walker Art Center,
Southern Theater, Red Eye Collaborations, etc.) and has infiltrated
venues in Japan, Russia, Canada, New York, Chicago, Colorado, New
Orleans, Oregon, Maine and street corners in Berkeley, California.
HIJACK was honored to inaugurate the new Walker Art Center's McGuire
Theater in April 2005.
HIJACK is the confluence and clash
of two independent compositional/kinesthetic impulses. Their dances
embrace juxtaposition. Believing work left in dialogue form opens
itself to dialogue with the audience, they present two individuals'
point-of-view, yet unreconciled. They ask, "how can two different
or contradictory elements (people/values) exist together?"
with the idealistic belief that they can. In this way they avoid
didactic treatment of social issues and strive, instead, for subtlety
and wit in addressing serious subjects.
HIJACK teaches contact improvisation
in Minneapolis and composition and improvisation on the road. They
regularly host residencies with their favorite dance innovators
and publish "Watcher-Reader", an obscure journal of dance
writing. HIJACK has been commissioned by: University of Minnesota,
Macalaster College, Carleton College, Ballet Arts Minnesota, Smokebrush
Theater (Colorado), 3-Legged Race, Walker Art Center, Links Hall
(Chicago), Bedlam Theater, and Barebones Puppet Collective. They
have been artists in residence at Blacklock Nature Sanctuary and
Bates Dance Festival. Their grants and Fellowships include: Bush
Fellowship, McKnight Fellowship, Jerome Foundation, and Forecast
Public ArtWorks.
Hijack photo by Bill Star |
It takes an incredibly deft touch to hold such silliness and
pain together, but the women of HIJACK seem to possess it...
– Claudia La Rocco, New York Times
Sheldon B. Smith –
Rhainjdaocmk Gheinjearcaktor
Sheldon B. Smith is creating a new work for HIJACK built from the
spare parts of a recent project called Random Generator. The new
piece, Rhainjdaocmk Gheinjearcaktor, is continuously rearranged
in performance by random instructions from a computer. While not
entirely improvised, RG relies heavily on the performers’
ability to rapidly make sense out of chaos. Unpredictable and wondrous
juxtapositions of movement, sound, text, and projected image make
for a theater event that is part playground, part nightmare, part
art, and all about learning how to cope in a world oversaturated
with information.
Sheldon B. Smith
is a choreographer, composer, and video artist. For eighteen years
he was a vital member of Chicago's contemporary performance community
and now lives in the Bay Area. His work has been seen throughout
the United States, Ireland, and Switzerland and has been supported
by numerous fiscal agencies. He teaches a variety of movement, music,
and technology related courses and is also a dance accompanist.
With his wife Lisa Wymore, he is co-artistic director of Smith/Wymore
Disappearing Acts, an award winning dance-theater company. www.smithwymore.org
HIJACK - Throwaway Contact Improvisation
(see workshops)
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