DANCE

DiverseWorks Arts Space presents Michelle Ellsworth: The Objectification of Things, Friday & Saturday, March 20 & 21, 2009, at 8pm. Commissioned by DiverseWorks with Miami Dade Cultural Affairs and The National Performance Network (NPN).

University of Colorado at Boulder dance professor Michelle Ellsworth has been described as hilarious, neurotic, quirky, a choreographer and, dare we add, brilliant. Her work invariably employs choreography as a vehicle for something much more complex than sheer movement.

In her newest piece, The Objectification of Things, a multimedia venture into a more complicated world of simple objects, she uses everything from a miniature green screen to shadow puppets to study life from a very different, scientific perspective. The Objectification of Things is part performance art, part ritual and part ethnography, illuminating the importance, impact, and fragile nature of the material world,

“I’m tired of the centralized nature of the human agenda,” she explains. “It’s been a real pleasure to work with objects, and that’s meant in the most respectful way.”

In the course of the work, said object experiences sex (in a stop-action animation), torture and death (without meaning to give away too much, death spurs a section called the “Wheels of Blame and Explain,” which include a foray into Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief). “People think its funny, but it’s not a part of my agenda in any way,” Ellsworth insists. “I actually tell sad stories, and people incidentally think it’s funny.” Sex, astro-turf, carbon biochemistry, a mini green screen sound stage and synchronized back-up dancers are all bedfellows in this multimedia, seven-sectioned, full length, collaborative, object-centric event.

This new work has original music and video by Michael Theodore, science by Jason Neff, set by Priscilla Cohan, lights by Bob Shannon, costume by Ann Piano, and co-choreography and dancing by Erika Randall and Jessica Meeker.

The Objectification of Things is a National Performance Network Creation Fund Project co-commissioned by DiverseWorks, Miami Dade College, Cultural Affairs and the National Performance Network. Major contributors to the National Performance Network are the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency).

For more information: www.npnweb.org