DANCE

Internationally renowned choreographer, Pat Graney, makes a grand return to Houston as she takes over DiverseWorks’ entire building with her latest site-specific exhibition and performance House of Mind. 

In an amalgamation of female memory, collective unconscious, and family and cultural histories, Graney creates an expansive kinesthetic sense of her work that takes the audience on an intense and thought-provoking journey through her past, her mother’s battles with Alzheimer’s and the quirky imagination that Houstonians saw in The Vivian Girls (2005) and Sleep (1998).

The public is invited to tour the installation, a multi-sensory experience that physically manifests aspects her mind, and then experience a choreographed performance, in which each viewer’s experience will be as unique as memory itself.

Performances are Friday & Saturday, January 30 & 31, February 5, 6, & 7 2008, 7:30pm in the DiverseWorks Theater. The installation will be on view January 31 – February 21 during gallery hours.

THE ENVIRONMENT/INSTALLATION
The House of Mind installation takes the viewer on a journey through the artist’s mind and memories. Scale, sound and emotion are used to explore childhood fears, dreams and fragments of stories that stay with us through life. House of Mind features thousands of books, typewritten police reports, high heels and lots more surprises. Also, one wall will feature a 100,000 mother-of-pearl button waterfall that alludes to the historical use of trading buttons/shells as currency. In House of Mind, memory is the currency that will create the space and, ultimately, the viewer’s experience.

STRUCTURE OF THE PERFORMANCE
Beginning at 7:30 p.m. each night, patrons will be invited to tour the installation. While performance will occur throughout the environment, a culminative ‘performance’ will begin at 8:00 p.m., lasting approximately 70 minutes. The performance aspect creates an overlapping ‘film’ sensibility showing the cause and effect of image and memory, where the performer is an actor in the memory, and the viewer is seen as the one who is remembering.

MEMORY, ALZHEIMERS AND THE ARTIST’S MOTHER
Since House of Mind has been in development, Graney’s mother has been diagnosed with short term memory loss. Graney has chosen to focus on some of the positive aspects of her mother’s manifestation of the disease, which has been an increased clarity of her long-term memory, as her short-term memory diminishes. Since House of Mind is about memory and its construction, it has also become about memory and its dissolution. Ms. Graney has been interviewing her mother about the physical and emotional sensibilities of memory loss with filmmaker Ellen Bromberg, the video artist for House of Mind. The work will feature footage of Graney’s mother speaking about her memory loss. There will also be information about Alzheimer’s in the lobby area of the installation.

EDUCATION AND OUTREACH
House of Mind will be working with students from Lamar High School as well as other area community groups to create memory books that will be used as part of the installation.

DiverseWorks will be hosting CRAFT ATTACK, an exciting afternoon of crafty fun with Pat Graney! The public is invited to build Houston's biggest button waterfall, book room, and high heel tower. This is an opportunity for the community to be a part of DiverseWorks’ history as your work will be part of DW's largest production/installation to date! CRAFT ATTACK will be at DiverseWorks on Saturday, January 17th , 12 to 6pm. Plus, we will be working with the Caroline Collective to host a craft night on Tuesday, January 20th. At 7pm.

ABOUT PAT GRANEY Seattle-based choreographer Pat Graney received Choreography Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts for 11 consecutive years, as well as from Artist Trust, the Washington State Arts Commission, the NEA International Program, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and recently was awarded the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. The Pat Graney Company, incorporated in 1990, has toured to most major American cities as well as internationally to Japan, England, Scotland, Germany, Singapore, Chile and Brazil. In 2000, Ms. Graney was selected to receive a 'Golden Umbrella' award for recognition of lifetime achievement in her art form.

Ms. Graney has been commissioned by Pacific Northwest Ballet, has created several large-scale gymnastic performance works, including 'Seven/Uneven' with visual artist Beliz Brother and 'Pier 62/63,' which featured 150 gymnasts aged 8-50 and was presented as part of the Goodwill Games in 1990. Ms. Graney has been choreographing in the Seattle area since 1979, creating over 40 works while living in the Pacific Northwest.

Pat Graney draws from a unique suitcase of sources—writers Julio Cortázar and Gertrude Stein, artist Henry Darger, American Sign Language, and the cross cultural art of tattooing—to make emphatically visual and kinetic dances. Grounded in collaboration with composers, writers, designers and visual artists, the work ranges from evenings of formally structured contemporary dance performed in theatres to a site-specific piece in a vast meadow for more than one hundred martial artists. Her latest project, House of Mind, will consist of installations and events (video projection, motion-triggered audio and live choreographed performance) in a 10,000 square foot warehouse transformed into a series of ‘memory rooms’.

For more than 15 years Graney has taught incarcerated women and girls in a workshop she developed that integrates performance, visual arts and writing. She produces performances in the prison, edits an annual anthology of writing, and trains other artists, both here and abroad, to create like projects. Now, along with a team of artists and community advisors, she is developing an arts-based transition program for female ex-offenders and their children. Whether she is working with inmates or technically trained dancers, process and investigation, making and the experience of that making is every bit as important as what gets shaped.
“My deepest and most heartfelt interest is in memory and perception, and in the weaving together of multiple elements in performance to create a temporal, almost viscous atmosphere which can communicate the simplest and most complex idea: that we all share commonality.” – Pat Graney