“meditation on what America+utopia might =” Work-in-Process Showing with Mary Armentrout

meditation on what America+utopia might = Work-in-Process Showing with Mary Armentrout
Date & Time: Saturday, September 21, 2024 6-7:30PM

Mary Armentrout presents a work-in-progress showing of her newest project: meditation on what America+utopia might =. This dance-theater performance-installation weaves together a de-construction of some of the colonialist tendencies still embedded in current American culture through the central figure of “the lady in the black dress,” with an absurdist but deeply serious dive into the fraught but beautiful tendency of Americans to yearn for utopia, which historically has not turned out particularly well for us – yet! “The lady in the black dress” is a metaphorical device, a ghostly, historically illogical, Victorian presence with meta-tendencies towards humor, towards complication, towards philosophical inquiry, towards both communal reckoning and community making, who engages her audiences in collective puzzling about how we get closer to the future we want from the pasts and presents we find ourselves enmeshed in.

During this roving site specific performance installation, the audience will visit several different spaces within the grounds of the BAC. Please wear shoes for easy walking, we will be inside and outside on the lawn, and there will be stairs. Please do not hesitate to let us know if you have mobility or disability issues or concerns; we aim to accommodate them, email Julia at julias@bethanyarts.org.

About Mary
Mary Armentrout is a San Francisco Bay Area-based experimental choreographer, performance artist, videographer, teacher, and the director of the Mary Armentrout Dance Theater. Armentrout calls her genre-mixing site-specific works performance installations; recent awards include an Isadora Duncan Dance Award and an EMPAC commission. Her works problematize the lived experience of intentionality and presence, and include the audience’s role as a key element of the performance equation. She installs work in both conventional and site-specific venues, and MADT has been presented at numerous venues all over the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as across the US and the UK, Europe, and China, recently touring to universities across the states and the UK, as well as the Brighton Fringe and the San Francisco International Arts Festival. For her EMPAC commission at RPI, she created a site specific piece, listening creates an opening, that journeyed from the RPI campus through the town of Troy to the banks of the Hudson River, which subsequently toured to the city blocks around ODC Theater in San Francisco, and through the Sarah Lawrence College campus.

She teaches a variety of movement, composition and Feldenkrais modalities, both to a thriving local community and as a guest artist nationally and internationally, and was recently voted a “Best of the East Bay” dance teacher in the local independent newspaper The East Bay Express. She also is the organizer of the Dance Discourse Project, an on-going series of artist-curated discussions on the Bay Area dance scene, and co-curates the mixed performance salon The Milkbar at her home studio in Richmond CA

This event is a Residency Community Program. As part of a residency at BAC, we ask each artist to build and facilitate a Community Program. Community Programs are a unique opportunity for both artists-in-residence and our local community to gather, engage, and be in conversation with one another through art. Community Programs are free engagements open to the public and/or in collaboration with a local community partner