INQUIRIES : jonathan@khecari.org

MARGINALIA

Two female bodies, intimate, impetuous. A scribbled commentary on the official text of subjectification and objectification, sexualization and desexualization, demonization and domestication.

This nimble 64 minute duet tours for $8000-$10,000, traveling with just four people (3-4 hotel rooms) and no shipping costs. It presents a powerful theatrical journey with complex choreography despite minimal tech needs. The elaborate lighting file can be sent ahead to well-appointed houses, or the design can be trimmed down for more modestly equipped venues, and the original score recording requires only stereo capacity speakers. The work travels with workshop options embracing all experience levels. We welcome people with disabilities.

A black and white semi-focused shot of brass cups. A male musician with a dark black t-shirt stands behind, semi-blurred, playing music.
Two female bodied dancers wearing bronze cropped tops and tight, high wasted shorts toss their heads back and forth with long black wigs on their heads

The original score for Marginalia is multi-layered and directional. Like a film score, its immersive sound environment has musical episodes and a kind of abstracted sound effect track. Joe St.Charles paralleled the choreographers’ material driven process using found, derelict, and traditional instrumental objects, with guest violinist Beltran DelCampo.

Marginalia’s lighting design was developed and supported through a technical residency at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, WI.  Featuring complex series of subtle chases and a striking color palette, its constantly shifting, otherworldly feel creates a sense of intimacy connecting audience to stage.

Jeff Hancock’s four-foot long wigs become living, moving elements and the costumes are continually shed and donned throughout the work. A play on gender tropes, the design presents a spectrum from the formality of uniform to the vulnerable humanness within Marginalia.

“both intimate and powerful”
See Chicago Dance

“rapid and unrelenting, fearlessly yielding to momentum… the gestures are gentle, yet alarming and incredibly exposed”
Chicago Reader

“one of the most powerful theatrical experiences I can remember”
Newcity

Two female dancers, both in shorts and sleeveless cream colored crop tops stand on a stage, illuminated only by a pink light on the bottom right corner. One dancer has her hand wrapped around the back of the neck of the other. Both stand tall, looking just past one another.
Two female dancers, both in long dark wigs, shorts, and sleeveless crop tops, pose on the floor illuminated by deep emerald lighting. One dancer, in the foreground, is outstretched on her hands and knees, while the other (behind the first) kneels with her head and arms flung up in the air.
Two female dancers, both in shorts and sleeveless cream colored crop tops, perform on a yellow tinted lit stage. One dancer’s upper back is suspended just off the ground while the other dancer hovers over her with her dance partner’s shirt in her mouth, as if she’s holding her up by her teeth.

Marginalia Trailer

Choreographers: Julia Rae Antonick and Jonathan Meyer
Composer: Joe St. Charles
Violin: Beltran DelCampo
Movement Performers: Amanda Mariast and Kara Brody
Costume Design: Jeff Hancock
Lighting Design: Jonathan Meyer
Video Documentation: Aren Viramontes, Lucas Greeff, Amanda Mariast
Photography: Chien-An Yuan and Ian Vechiotti
Presented at Revere Auditorium, Indian Boundary Cultural Center, Elevate 2018, 2019 CDF Awards Ceremony, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, and Links Hall

Marginalia at Kohler Tech Residency

Choreographers: Julia Rae Antonick and Jonathan Meyer
Composer: Joe St. Charles
Violin: Beltran DelCampo
Movement Performers: Amanda Mariast and Kara Brody
Costume Design: Jeff Hancock
Lighting Design: Jonathan Meyer
Video Documentation: Aren Viramontes
Presented in 2019 at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center

Marginalia at Links Hall

Choreographers: Julia Rae Antonick and Jonathan Meyer
Composer: Joe St. Charles
Violin: Beltran DelCampo
Movement Performers: Amanda Mariast and Kara Brody
Tech Assistance: Giau Truong
Stage Management: Emily Navarra
Costume Design: Jeff Hancock
Lighting Design: Jonathan Meyer
Video Documentation: Aren Viramontes and Lucas Greef
Premiered in 2019 at Links Hall
Two dancers, with long dark wigs covering their heads, perform on a wood-floored stage under green and blue lighting. One is crouched on the ground, the other stands over her arm wrapped around the back of the lower dancer’s neck.

Marginalia is two female bodies, intimate, impetuous. A scribbled commentary on the official text of subjectification and objectification, sexualization and desexualization, demonization and domestication. Two women lift, work, sweat, and touch. Claiming the nuanced complexity of female rapport. Things that happen every day. Tiny revolts, unseen, unrecorded. Or a revolt upheld and enlarged by each witness. Marginalia is committed to somatic equality. Valuing the impulses of cells and fluids as highly as the nervous system. Putting the human creature on equal footing with the socialized person. An experiential metaphor. If we would have equity between all elements of society can we start with equally valuing all aspects of the body?

The scrawl of marginalia
Centralize the marginal
The body inherently political
Women’s bodies a political battleground
A body is not a battleground
A body is a person

Marginalia was created by Julia Rae Antonick and Jonathan Meyer in a collaborative process that spanned over three years, working closely with dancers Kara Brody and Amanda Maraist to migrate Antonick’s and Meyer’s idiosyncratic improvisation to a thoroughly digested, minutely nuanced choreography.

A black and white image of a male presenting person, Jonathan, stands with his hand on his chin looking on at a rehearsal.

Julia Rae Antonick – Executive/Artistic Director

Julia Rae Antonick is a contemporary choreographer and dancer whose movement reflects a digestion of contemporary, modern and classical dance forms from American, European and Indonesian roots. Her choreography emphasizes the creation of worlds the audience can enter, disrupting ingrained patterns of attention and reawakening a viewer to a language of kinetics, filigree and somatically informed partnering work. Julia has been immersed in an ongoing collaboration with Jonathan Meyer and Joe St.Charles for over a decade. With Meyer, she has served as Artistic/Executive Director for Khecari since 2010. Julia graduated from the Chicago Academy for the Arts with the Dance Department’s Award of Excellence and received her BFA in dance from CalArts. Antonick has been awarded choreographic residencies at Djerassi, Ragdale, Hambidge, Links Hall, The Chicago Cultural Center, Centrum, was chosen for NEFA’s Regional Dance Development Initiative, Links Hall’s Touring project, Mordine&Co.’s Emerging Artist Program, Korespoondance’s Fillimit and presented in the 40th anniversary season at The Dance Center of Columbia College. She has received grants from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, Illinois Arts Council, The Chicago Seminar on Dance and Performance, Driehaus, Donnelley, Cheney and Logan foundations, was awarded the Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist Grant for 2010, has been one of NewCity’s best choreographers and top 50 players and a nominee for the 3Arts award and USA Artist Fellowship. Julia has been a mentor/outside eye for Links Hall’s LinkUp and CoMission residencies, taught at Hubbard Street’s Lou Conte Dance Studios and Columbia College, and is an artist in residence at Indian Boundary Cultural Center through Khecari and the Arts Partners in Residence program.

Jonathan Meyer – Executive/Artistic Director

Somatically driven, Jonathan Meyer works to develop an idiosyncratic movement palette blurring grace and awkwardness, building strange lands that can delight, baffle, and open new possibilities. A gymnast in high school, Jonathan Meyer discovered dance at Oberlin College where he studied release technique and critical theory with Nusha Martynuk and Ann Cooper Albright. After a capoeira immersion in Brazil with Maestre Medicina, he returned to college to receive an undergraduate degree in dance from UNC Greensboro. Meyer has danced for The High Risk Group, Pierre-Paul Savoie, Asimina Chremos, and The Seldoms. In addition to dance, Meyer has worked with at-risk youth in wilderness therapy programs in Utah teaching primitive skills, and is a Certified Practitioner of Body-Mind Centering®. In 2002 Meyer founded Khecari in Taos, New Mexico. In 2006, Meyer moved Khecari to Chicago, and shortly thereafter he began his intensive collaboration and partnership with Julia Rae Antonick, with whom he runs the company. Through Khecari, Meyer and Antonick create and present their own work, in addition to choreographing collaboratively. Meyer has been a CDF Lab Artist & RDDI participant, and an artist in residence at Djerassi, Ragdale, Hambidge, Abigail, The Kohler Art Center, Links Hall, The Chicago Cultural Center, and The Chicago Park District.