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THREE FROM CHICAGO IN DURHAM’S MOST EXCITING OFF-ADF DANCE!
PROJECT #2

DURHAM ARTS COUNCIL – PSI THEATER
120 MORRIS STREET, DURHAM, NC

SATURDAY JUNE 28TH 2PM (MATINEE): $10 general or $6 reduced
SATURDAY JUNE 28TH 8PM (EVENING): $12 general or $8 reduced

(Reduced tickets for students, seniors, artists, etc., at your discretion)
Reservations at: reservations@khecari.org

Khecari Dance Theatre presents three of Chicago’s premiere independent choreographers in two performances on Saturday, June 28th. Project #2 is a kinetic joyride composting habit and gender to yield a moment-to-moment negotiation of weight, balance, and momentum. This is the second stage in an ongoing duet collaboration between Julia Rae Antonick and Khecari Artistic Director Jonathan Meyer. This is a meeting of two highly idiosyncratic, potently athletic choreographers in a celebration of the euphoric physicality of contemporary dance partnering and the surprising beauty that can arise from the pursuit of the awkward. This event also features a new solo created and performed by Chicago’s maverick diva, Asimina Chremos.

Taking place at the Durham Arts Council PSI Theatre, this Durham premiere features original music from Joseph St. Charles and Patrick McCarthy. Iris Bainum-Houle has developed a line of contemporary dance gear specifically for this project, bringing together elements of costume, armor, and sportswear in a marriage of form and function. Khecari has previously performed at UNC Greensboro, UNC Charlotte, and the Afro-American Cultural Center in Charlotte; this is a debut for Khecari in Durham.

Past Shows

Project #2

Friday, May 23 & Saturday May 24 at 7pm

Around the Coyote Gallery
1935 1/2 W North Ave (at Damen & Milwaukee)

tickets $12 if you can, $8 if you can't

Free in trade for volunteer help

Project #2 is a kinetic joy-ride composting habit and gender to yield a moment-to-moment choreographic negotiation of weight, balance, and momentum. This is the second phase of development in a long-term duet collaboration between independent choreographer Julia Rae Antonick and Khecari artistic director Jonathan Meyer. Also in this show we welcome special guest Asimina Chremos in a solo dance performance.

Project #2 features original live music from Joseph St Charles and Patrick McCarthy and new dance wear costumed by Iris Bainum-Houle.

For reservations or to volunteer, contact: reservations@khecari.org

For ticket sales online, contact: www.seechicagodance.com

For directions to Around the Coyote contact: www.aroundthecoyote.org or 773.342.6777

THE WONDER-CABINET OF
DR. WUNDERKAMMER

November 8th, 9th,15th & 16th, 2007

Being a most Wondrous Exhibition, brought to the Public for the Edification & Delight of those persons of Learned & Inquisitive Ilk, not excluding those seeking Entertainment or Diversion, of divers Artefacts, movements of the Corporeal Body, and Thespian Phenomena, and accompanied by those vibrations of the Dense Airs in conjunction with the like circulations of the Humours, which, in the mirroring of the Celestial Rhythms, we are wont to call Music, by the Emminent Dr. Wunderkammer, and inclusive of such Rare & Incredible Specimens as Cordyceps Terpsichorius, wherein those notably shy & timorous Homo Terpsichorius are most Grievously Infected with Alien Spores which, in commandeering their autonomic & sympathetic Nervous Functions, do force them to effect dubious Choreographic Ends, or Exhibit A, Exhibit B, which offers to the Common View for the first time a male Elm Dryad, sequestered from its native woodland, and whose heretofore unseen Gyrations reflect a most Pathetic Mourning for its lost Arboreal Home, or that startling Dancing Duo, An Absence of Meaning Opens a Rift in Time, whose Perambulations & Convulsive Shudderings have accomplished, via the Propitious Intersection of an Hungarian Ray and Pure Silver, a veritable Alchemical Transmutation of That Which Is Known into Something Else, or those Four Aspects, Ex Nihilo, which, wanting only Quintessence, have nevertheless superseded Trivium & Quadrivium alike and have thus yielded a Transcendent Speculation on the Nature of the Simian Family as regards the Ancient & Sacred Precepts of Cecchetti & Vaganova.

This Rare Display will be Housed at the Hamlin Park Fieldhouse, 3035 North Hoyne, for the Limited Duration of those Thursdays & Fridays of November 8th & 9th and 15th & 16th, 2007 Anno Domini, and Exhibition will begin at the post meridiem hour of 7:30, wherein entrance is in compensation of $15 General Admission or $12 for those of a Studious or Elderly Persuasion, etc., etc.

Dr. Wunderkammer would like to extend most Heartfelt Thanks, for the Inestimable and Sine Que Non aid in the Achieving of this Wonder-Cabinet, of Jonathan Meyer, for Principle Choreographic Oversight, and No Less the Choreographic & Performative Contributions of Julia Antonick, Asimina Chremos, Krista Hughes, Kendall Loyer, Melissa Mallinson, and The Megans Rhyme & Schneeberger as well as the Advisatory Choreographic Participation of Ginger Farley, Nicole LeGette, Margaret Morris, etc., and for the splendid Musical Contributions of Carol Genetti & Nevin Hersch and those comely Costume Creations of Iris Bainum-Houle.

This Most Worthy Exhibition is in conjunction with the Chicago Moving Company Performance Project, which Organization is an Arts Partner with the Park District of The Great City of Chicago, and is, moreover, in Residence at said Hamlin Park Fieldhouse.

"The Opal Door"

June 7th, 8th, 14th & 15th, 2007

Every moment is poised in eternity. Structured as a series of disparate snapshots offering a multi-faceted vision of possibility, fear, cataclysm, and redemption, The Opal Door presents a world on the brink. From this precarious suspended moment – replete with grief and promise, in all its blind violence and stubborn, transformative beauty – a community looks forward and back, ever returning, ever struggling to conquer the desperate present, ever grappling with the haunting presence of unseen forces operating in their midst. With a unique fusion of classical and post-modern dance forms and a world-ranging vocabulary of movement, Khecari Dance Theatre invites you on an epic journey to the present day: frozen and explosive, minute and expansive, tender and violent, grotesquely evocative and startlingly hopeful.

Guest artist Asimina Chremos joins eight Khecari dancers in this work set to music by Mandible Chatter with Encomiast and Toby Sinkinson and costumed by Iris Bainum-Houle.

This program is part of the Chicago Moving Company Performance Project. The Chicago Moving Company is an Arts Partner with the Chicago Park District in residence at Hamlin Park.

"The Flesh of Flowers"

March 22 and 23, 2007

Khecari Artist Director Jonathan Meyer's work "The Flesh of Flowers," set on Mordine & Company, will be shown at this concert. For more information visit www.mordine.org.

"The Opal Door"
(a work in progress)
LinkUp Residency Artists: New Works
March 30 - April 1, 2007

Other LinkUp artists: Kristina Fluty, Angela Gronroos, and Marysue Miller

Khecari Dance Theatre will show a work-in-progress excerpt of "The Opal Door."

"Dyad"

October 2006

Dyad is the cellular sensing and communication that sidesteps our cerebral oversight, the riot in the basement of animal beings contending with the tyranny of our social selves, the communion of creatures fleeing the human isolation of our technological world. Dyad draws from the richly paradoxical union of life-surge and death-drive that is intrinsic to love – the ceremonial sacrifice of the Beloved, the offering of the self for consumption, the tender ferocity that tears the whole and repairs the broken, the birth-from-death that is the blossoming of love, the destructive Kali who is lover to the cosmos and mother to the world: for love rends the form and order of life to place the Beloved in the realm of the immortal.
Dyad is an evening-length duet choreographed by Khecari’s artistic director, Jonathan Meyer, with new music for guitar and cello from Nathaniel Braddock and Jason McDermott. Dancers Lia Bonfilio and Jonathan Meyer shine in executing movement ranging from tango to kung-fu movie choreography, capoeira to modern dance, ballet to butoh. A work-in-progress of Dyad won the gold medal award for best in dance at the 2006 Boulder International Fringe Festival.

"Mnemosyne" "Gold medal winner for 'best-in-dance' at the Boulder International Fringe Festival"
AUGUST 2006
United as a single organism, bodies share the space in scintillating intimacy: a conjunction sliding from tenderness to aggression, frustration to harmony with the same organic eddying that directs the flow of momentum from one to another. Gravity becomes a metaphor for love as intricate floor work articulates an inescapable force that is as impersonal as it is personally felt. Fierce athleticism and suspended stillness mirror the turbulence and serenity of relationship in all its richness and uncertainty. The title piece, Mnemosyne, featuring music from Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Taos dancer Amber Vásquez, is an exploration of the intersection of memory, identity, and desire: our incessant delving backwards to wrest an ephemeral uniformity we can call the Self. Gravity, a solo by Artistic Director Jonathan Meyer, is an intricate movement poem proposing that true freedom is found not in escaping external limitations, but precisely in our response to them. Gravity is performed to the music of Henryk Górecki’s 3rd Symphony. Finally, Khecari will present the new Chicago company in an excerpt from their upcoming premiere, Dyad. With new music for guitar and cello from Chicago’s Nathaniel Braddock, Dyad is the cellular sensing and communication that sidesteps our cerebral oversight, the riot in the basement of our animal beings contending with the tyranny of our social selves.

"Mnemosyne Has Won the Lottery But Lost Her Ticket"

December 2005

Mnemosyne Has Won the Lottery But Lost Her Ticket presents dialogues between memory, identity, and desire through a multifaceted lens of gesture, repetition, and human relationship dynamic. Mnemosyne (ne-mah-si-nee), the Greek goddess of memory, is our muse as we examine our incessant delving backwards to wrest an ephemeral uniformity we can call the Self. Mnemosyne brings to the stage three of Khecari’s finest dancers: Jonathan Meyer, Elizabeth Shuler, and Amber Vásquez.

Performed to a score by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, a leader in the post-rock revolution, this new evening-length work featuring some of the most innovative choreography happening in modern dance today. At times a fierce pas de deux more resembling scenes from The Matrix than ballet, Mnemosyne is at other times a sweet lullaby uniting yearning humans. Most of all, we are on stage as we are in life: beings struggling to meet each other in fulfilling needs we barely understand, and, when we least expect it, falling afraid into the redemption we couldn’t foresee.

"Luminous"

June 2005

Khecari Dance Theatre opens their fourth season with Luminous. As powerful, beautiful, and innovative as any previous work, Luminous offers five new choreographies of light, humor, joy, and playful speculation.
Three solos feature Meyer. The first, “Meaning Factory,” a wry exploration of the inescapable human penchant for finding meaning in all we perceive, incorporates movement, text, live music, and a decrepit typewriter.
“Joy”, dedicated to Meyer’s grandmother, is a piece about nothing more – and nothing less – than the joy of dance, with music from Ravi Shankar’s daughter, Anoushka Shankar.
The centerpiece of Luminous, “Freedom” takes place in, on, and below a large clear plastic box suffused with light suspended in the air. “Freedom” plumbs the psychological significance of freedom, insisting that our external limitations are often fluid, depending upon our internal resources for their meaning: a cage can be a womb, a womb a jungle gym.
Soloists Elizabeth Shuler and Amber Vasquez, a new-comer of Alvin Ailey fame, are joined by Lindsey Drury, Jes Grimes, Sonja Mayer, and Sare Rane in “High Tea.” With music from drum-and-viola duo Hanged’Up, “High Tea” is a relentlessly high-energy choreographic whirlwind punctuated by delicious tongue-in-cheek humor.
“Secret”, a duet for two women to music by Iceland’s dreamy Múm, is a tribute to the hidden palaces, enchanted gardens, and private kingdoms of childhood.

"RAPTURE"

December 2004

Embarking on its most ambitious project to date, Khecari Dance Theatre’s Rapture will be an evening-length choreography to Henryk Górecki’s “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.” An expansion of Jonathan Meyer’s solo Gravity, set to the second movement of the symphony and seen in Khecari’s past June show Nexus, this new work brings seven of Taos’ finest dancers to the stage. Górecki’s lush score of oceanic string orchestra and piercing soprano encompasses a paradoxic balance of darkness and light, weight and buoyancy, grief and joy. Using this, the choreography celebrates the rapture that awaits us when we voyage through the shadowlands.

Image by Jaap Vanderplas

"NEXUS"

June 2004

With Nexus, Khecari Dance Theatre offers its most exciting, professional, and diverse production to date. A return to the variety of a mixed bill, Nexus is a collection of eight new dance pieces choreographed by Jonathan Meyer exploring the musical, movement, and psychological aspects of rhythm. Repetition, surprise, tension, denöuement, habit, transformation: accompanied by an unusually wide range of ecclectic musical genres, these phenomena become devices in elucidating the internal rhythms of relationship, ritual, and desire.

Nexus is a roller-coaster ride encompassing somber beauty, joyful hilarity, and exhilarating physicality.Khecari’s fifth major production brings six of Taos’ finest dancers to the stage for Meyer’s “risk- taking dance theater” (Taos News). “Passionate, heart-centered movement [vibrating] with a lucid, muscular physicality” (Scott Lundius, Director, Taos Dance) join music such as Brazil’s African-rooted Candomblé, Kalyi Jagat’s Hungarian gypsy, Henryk Górecki, and Iceland’s Sigur Rós. Surprises include a fierce and fun duet fusing Jazz dance and Bharatanatyam (a classical Indian dance), and a solo by Meyer accompanied by text written and performed by Taos’ Paul Scallon.

"IMMANUEL"

December 2003

The largest Khecari dance ensemble yet, including Khecari company members and children from the community, will take the stage in an original choreography telling the story of the first Christmas Eve in the hour before Christ’s birth. The music for this ballet, Johann Sebastian Bach’s glorious “Christmas Oratorio," will be sung live by Taos’ Opera Tazza.
Forget the Nutcracker! From frolicking flocks of sheep to ethereal angels dancing in the mists to the most surprising Wise Man trio you’ve seen, this show will dazzle and move audiences of all ages.

"Dream"

May 2003

“Dream” is a return to abstract movement choreography after Khecari’s text-based production “Lorca.” A voyage into the nether realms of the psyche, “Dream” creates and inhabits the droll world of dreams where context is inverted: the illogical seems fitting, the unexpected surprising. With sumptuous costumes by KC Weakley and a lush score by Mandible Chatter, this evening-length work leaps effortlessly from the comic to the sensual to the somber. Cast members include Taoseños Jaimie Henthorn, Elizabeth Shuler, and Jonathan Meyer and special guest Giacomo Zafarano appearing courtesy of Moving People Dance Theater in Santa Fe. This show contains partial nudity. Subject matter is considered appropriate for children.

"Lorca"

November, December 2002 & January 2003

"Lorca" is a theatre and dance event using poems, poetic prose, and plays written by Federico Garcia Lorca. He was a friend and collaborator with Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel among others. Lorca was killed during the Spanish Civil War; most likely, he was assassinated by the fascists for political reasons. Lorca’s writing is pregnant with evocative imagery and complex symbolism. Sometimes lyrical, sometimes grotesque, often darkly humorous and always emotionally rich, the texts range from deceptively naïve to self-consciously bizarre.

In putting Lorca to movement, Khecari explores and illuminates layers of meaning in text and subtext, embellishing subtleties and underscoring simplicities, yet always embracing the centrality of Lorca’s poignant irrationality.

The first half of the show will feature selections from Lorca’s "impossible theatre," an approach to theatre that was later to be further developed by the likes of Becket and Ionesco, with themes revolving around the conflict between personal desires and societal limitations and the gap between what we strive for and what we truly want. "The Evil Curse of the Butterfly" forms the second half of the piece. Generally considered a children’s play, this is a tragicomic love story set in a meadow people by insects.

"Lorca" will feature both professional actors and dancers from the community and also advanced students from the Taos High School drama program. Conceived, created, and directed by Khecari Dance Theatre’s artistic director, Jonathan Meyer, "Lorca" will showcase other local talents, through collaborations with composer and musician Natalie Farr and costume designer K.C. Weakley.

"MOTHS TO THE FLAME"

May 2002

A group of moths are hovering around the edges of a candle, discoursing on the nature of the flame; each flies in successively closer and returns; each claims a deeper knowledge of the flame. Only the eldest and the youngest remain silent in the discussion. After some time, the youngest, still saying nothing, flies directly into the center of the flame: in a flash of light, the moth is gone, leaving only a foul wisp of smoke. Finally the eldest speaks: “That moth, he understands the flame.”
Khecari Dance Theatre’s company debut features ten dancers in five original choreographies, including guest choreographer and dancer Clyde Smith, former Kirov Ballet prima Ludmilla Lupokhova, and Artistic Director Jonathan Meyer’s first publicly presented work in the United States. Centered around Meyer’s 18 minute solo “Ascent,” Moths To the Flame is a meditation on the blissful rewards and dangerous fruition of spiritual passion.