aMID Festival
January 2016

Links Hall Co-Founder Bob Eisen was an active and prominent member of Chicago’s performing arts/dance community from the mid 70’s until 2000, receiving numerous awards and grants both for his artistic work and his contribution to the community. For one full year, 2004-2005, he danced and traveled his way around the world. Presently he divides his time between living in Russia, where he dances, travels, teaches, studies the language and lives; and New York City which has been home for the past 16 years.

Deborah Hay
aMID presents the world premiere of “My Choreographed Body”, a dance in three parts. “What my body can do is limited,” Hay says. “This is not a bad thing because how I choreograph frees me from those limitations. Writing is then how I reframe and understand the body through my choreography.”

Cynthia Oliver
BOOM! is a duet with choreography and text created in collaboration with Leslie Cuyjet; both performers are individuals, friends, strangers, family, younger/older versions of themselves, negotiating relations that are persistently in flux.The piece examines the conditions of the two performing black women when life happens, when “fairness” and cause and effect do not necessarily align.

Zephyr Dance
Wall Dance is an excerpt that of a work that was created as a part of Allowances and Occurrences, a three-hour durational work, takes place in a space that is 16 feet long by two and a half feet deep. Kranicke found inspiration for the original improvisations in the classical groupings and bas-relief panels of late medieval and Renaissance carvings. The impetus was to investigate the deep, dramatic spatial qualities achieved within the limited depth inherent in these works. The construction of the dance invites audience members to view it frontally, as a series of film stills or tableaux reminiscent of Renaissance or baroque master painting, and up close at a bias, to investigate its complex spatial qualities.

Bebe Miller
Bebe Miller has received four New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation and many others. A Distinguished Professor in Dance at The Ohio State University’s College of Arts and Humanities from 2000–2016, Miller received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Ursinus College in 2009. Miller’s vision of dance and performance resides in her faith in the moving body as a record of thought, experience, and beauty. Her aesthetic relies on the interplay of a work’s idea, its physicality, and the contributions of company members to fashion its singular voice. Seeking to expand the language of dance, Bebe Miller Company’s work encompasses choreography, writing, film, video and digital media. Bebe Miller Company was formed in 1985; since then, Miller has created more than 50 dance works for the company that have been performed in nearly 400 engagements worldwide.

Pranita Jain
“What the body remembers ” explores the movement vocabulary so deeply set in our ethos. As artists living in a transnational world, the bodies trained in a particular structure re-create new language to explain ourselves.

Smith/Wymore
“Brief Sketch from Human Apparatus” (1/28-1/29), an excerpt from a new work in progress that will examine multiple perspectives around the so-called “quantified-self” movement.
Ian Heisters, Peter Carpentar, and Lisa Gonzales join SWDA for “Zero Return” (1/30-1/31), an installation dance that places live improvisational performance in the context of a computerized system, which makes various demands on the participants throughout the work.