12 Hour Play - Feb 25

Portland dancer and interdisciplinary explorer Emily Stone has invited all of us to a 12-hour endurance feat. Some of Portland and Seattle's finest dancers, artists, and musicians, will dance, art, and music their socks off for our pleasure and enjoyment. "The 12-Hour Play" happens February 25, Saturday night to Sunday morning, at Center Space in SE Portland (a fine space some of you will remember from the first EL-fest, way back in ought-two). Details, directions follow.

Come and Witness this Artistic Endurance Event!

The 12 Hour Play

February 25th 6pm to 6am
Saturday Night to Sunday Morning
Center Space:  420 SE 6th Avenue (between Stark and Oak)
$5-10 sliding scale/suggested donation
More info and beautiful photos of the 12 Hour Play at www.makejetsilent.com/12hourplay

The 12 Hour Play is a non-stop, 12-hour performance series, designed to explore the possibilities of music and dance improvisation. Initially started in 2003 as part of COCA's annual "Painting Marathon", this installment is a Seattle/Portland collaboration!

Come and see!  Bring chocolate and gatorade!  We'll be awake for you!  What else will you be doing at 1:15 am Sunday morning?  No strings attached.  We will amaze you.
We will look you straight in the eye.

Dancers: Emily Stone (PDX), Alia Swersky (SEA), Tonya Lockyer (SEA), Beth Graczyk (SEA), and Aaron Swartzman (SEA)

Sound: J.P. Jenkins (PDX), Jonathan Sielaff (PDX), Matt Carlson (PDX), Angelina Baldoz (SEA), and Jason E Anderson (SEA)

Photographer Tim Summers and a "Mystery" writer will take photos and write for 12 hours straight! 

Audience members are free to come and go as they please, witnessing the improvisation/installation for any length of time between 6pm sunset Saturday night and 6am sunrise Sunday morning.

12 Hour Play allows the development of creative interaction without being restricted by standard time constraints. In an effort to curb under-developed or overtly controlled artistic improvisation, the series hopes to challenge the performer, the audience and the relationship between the two.

To ensure complete focus on the sounds and movement, performers are instructed to maintain the development of their creative interactions throughout the entire 12-hour period.  12 Hour Play challenges the standard paradigm of performance, offering a unique setting to explore participation by audience and artist alike.  Audience members are encouraged to experience the event at any time, and for as long as they like. Through improvisation and group/audience awareness, the performers will explore each moment between the hours of 6pm and 6am.  12 Hour Play is co-produced by dancer Beth Graczyk and musician Jason E Anderson.

Performer Bios:

Alia Swersky
Alia Swersky is a movement artist, performer, teacher & explorer of improvisation. She has danced as a member of the LeGendre Performance Group, The Maureen Whiting Co. and in the works of many other Seattle artists. She also creates her own improvisational and choreographic works. Influences include modern dance, release/somatic techniques, yoga, Buddhist meditation, Karen Nelson & many wonderful dance partners and teachers. She is a member of the non-profit DAG (Dance Art Group) and co-organizer and teacher of SFADI (The Seattle Festival of Alternative Dance & Improvisation). She currently teaches at University Prep and as an adjunct faculty at Cornish College of the Arts.

Tonya Lockyer
Tonya Lockyer has worked internationally as a dancer, writer, vocalist, improviser, dancemaker and educator. At age nine, she left the island of Newfoundland for downtown Toronto to study at the National Ballet School of Canada. After dancing with Contemporary Dancers Canada she moved to NYC to study with Merce Cunningham and John Cage. 1993-98 she danced in NYC the work of Cunningham, Donald Byrd and others and was Principle Dancer/rehearsal director/vocalist for Paula Josa-Jones, Boston. 1999-04 Lockyer directed her own company VIA, a Seattle collaborative ensemble for choreography, improvisation and research. Lockyer‚s choreography and soundscores have won many awards and residencies and have been presented throughout the US and Canada; and in France, Poland, Turkey and Russia.  She has created over 20 commissions for dance/opera/theater companies, festivals and universities; and collaborated with composers Pauline Oliveros, Ellen Fullman, Munir Beken, Bill Horist, and Stuart Dempster.  Currently, Lockyer is focusing on solo projects and continuing her research through movement, language and sound. She is on the faculty of Cornish College for the Arts and will be a Guest Artist at Bringham Young University and The Univeristy of Washington this Fall.

Beth Graczyk
Beth Graczyk has had the pleasure of working with several artists/choreographers in Seattle since 2000 including Sheri Cohen, Corrie Befort, Karl Frost, Crispin Spaeth, Locate Performance Group, and Bekoo. She is on her second season with Mary Sheldon Scott/Jarrad Powell Performance. Recently Beth traveled to Ecuador with Bekoo on a four-city tour, as well as to Japan performing with dancer Corrie Befort, and musicians Tim Olive and Bunsho Nisikawa. This spring she will be traveling to Philadelphia and Minneapolis for Paige Barnes‚ piece „Molt‰, and in June will head to New York to perform at Dance Theater Workshop with MSS/JPP. She is currently collaborating with musician Jason Anderson, with whom she has performed with at Gallery 1412, CoCA, Open Flight, and most recently at Performance Works Northwest (with miss Emily Stone) in Portland.

Emily Stone
Emily Stone bridges dance and theatre worlds by being an actor, dancer, choreographer and director. Her work has been produced in both Seattle and Portland by PICA‚s TBA Festival, On the Boards‚ Northwest New Works and 12 Minutes Max, 10 Tiny Dances, Performance Works Northwest, Telegraph Arts‚ Chroma Project, Velocity Studio and defunkt theater. As a dancer, she has appeared in work by Sheri Cohen, Linda Austin, Linda K Johnson, Corrie Befort, and Tahni Holt, as well as performed and directed for her own theater/dance company Salvage Yard with fellow Lewis and Clark College alum James Moore. She is currently earning an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art at Goddard College and learning how to sing with Angelle Hebert and Philip Kraft for their upcoming show in Portland this spring. Emily most recently improvised incognito with Beth and Jason at PWNW‚s Boris and Natasha Cabaret.

Aaron York Swartzman
Aaron York Swartzman started jumping over milk cartons in first grade and had so much fun that his parents put him into creative movement classes. Thus began his reluctant and imaginative relationship with modern dance. After traveling to Japan with the children‚s dance company Kaleidoscopes Aaron left children‚s dance to attend high school and consider himself smarter than the „in‰ crowd he wanted reasonably badly to join. Attending New College in Sarasota, Florida Aaron refined his lack of not knowing what to do for a career while asking all the big questions and staying up late at night improvising rich tapestries of spur of the moment creativity. He wrote his undergraduate thesis on the ways story and metaphor affect our perceptions of life, a subject he continues to be fascinated by. Graduating college and moving briefly to San Francisco, he started learning Capoeira. Capoeira not only brought him into contact with dancers to encourage him, it also assuaged his fears of music and partnering, leading him to get seriously back into dance. Since that time Aaron has focused primarily upon dance amidst the myriad of chaotic half-baked plans, travel urges, yearnings and moments of reflection that constitute his life. He has danced primarily with KT Niehoff‚s LINGOdancetheater and Amii Legendre, drinking up knowledge and performing in venues from Dƒsseldorf, Germany to Cleveland, Mississippi.  Now a Treineu in Capoeira Angola, Aaron continues to explore movement as play, work and magic. He loves improvisation and is overwhelmingly excited to be performing 12 hour play on his 31st birthday.

Angelina Baldoz
Angelina Baldoz has been performing and creating music in the Seattle area with a strong involvement in the improvisational music scene as well as the vibrant dance community that is currently thriving in Seattle. She has devoted herself to investigating the many different sounds and musical qualities in her instrument, the trumpet. Angelina‚s compositions focus on the exploration of the performance space as its own resonating chamber, improvising with what the room, as well as what the performers and the audience have to offer. Her distinctive trumpet playing has been presented in collaboration with many wonderful musicians and movement artists, such as Paul Hoskin, Deborah Hay, Tari Nelson-Zagar, Jack Wright, Linda Austin, Gust Burns, Gregory Reynolds, Greg Campbell, Lori Goldston, Ellen Fullman, Jessie Canterbury, Susie Kozawa, Margit Galanter, Jessika Kenney and Jason E Anderson. Angelina has just finished creating a music score for the film „Aliens Cut My Hair‰, a campy sci-fi B film, created by Michael McIntosh and a crew of radical fairies in San Francisco, ten years ago and composed and performed for an evening length dance concert with Portland choreographer Linda Austin.

Matt Carlson
In addition to writing chamber music and electro-acoustic/musique concrete, composer Matt Carlson is known as a member of Seattle‚s neo-krautrock band Schlaze Cubed and ambient/drone trio Bonus. He was also a founding member of the Gallery 1412 collective and has done extensive work in Seattle‚s free improvisation community as an analog synth player, collaborating with Gust Burns, Angelina Baldoz, and Kazutaka Nomura among others. His most recent work is a solo CD of acoustic guitar and vocal based work entitled „Making Time‰, which is
„an attempt to question the assumptions inherent in the Œsinger-songwriter‚ form.‰ The album can be downloaded in its entirity from his website: www.bucketfactory.com

Jean-Paul Jenkins
Jean-Paul Jenkins plays music but rarely in the 3rd person. His interests include but more often than not exclude, since the possibilities are rather large. There are a variety of instruments in
his apartment that all deserve equal attention but fortunately are not often jealous of each other. There is a computer and a stereo and several mixing boards and contact mics and normal mics and cables and amps, all of which are applied to the music. He makes his own instruments which are rarely of the quality of store-bought ones and he has gotten over that. He has friends and acquaintances who also own and play instruments and he spends time with them making food and talking far more than playing but that happens too. He likes the sound of a lot of things that people generally do not consider music. He lives in Portland Oregon above a bike shop and is owned by a cat named Hablo.
Websites:
www.photobucket.com/albums/v687/jaypeenanda/
www.myspace.com/birdypie

Jonathan Sielaff
Jonathan Sielaff, composer/performer Born in Miami, FL, grew up in a musical family (his father and grandfather were both professional reed players). He began his studies with the piano, then picked up guitar and electronics in his teens, and has now been focusing on the clarinets. In composing and performing, he draws heavily from his experiences traveling and living in the South Pacific and Asia as well as participating in a wide array of musical settings and genres. He has lived in Portland since 2000 where he regularly collaborates with a variety of musicians, poets, dancers, and filmmakers.
Website:
www.jonathansielaff.blogspot.com

Jason E Anderson
Jason E Anderson is a sound and visual artist from Seattle. His work includes live performances, recorded sound works, sound installations, graphic art, collage and video works. Anderson‚s recorded work and live performances combine a sense of logical and intuitive approaches to
music improvisation and experimentation. Through the use of electronically generated, processed and natural sound, his work fits into the more abstract realm of electronic music. He performs with
guitar, sampler, computer and/or turntable. Anderson has released several recordings, including B**F‚s (BNSF) release Object 6 on Locust Music. In 2005, he founded the label make jet silent. He is currently working on his first solo record, creating a multi-disciplinary art project/personal mythology known as path of the elk, and co-presenting 12 Hour Play with fellow improviser and dance collaborator, Beth Graczyk. In the spring of 2006, Anderson will tour the US and Europe to perform with regional improvisers.
Website:
www.pathoftheelk.com