Pat Catterson's Choreographic Comeback is Global - Literally

Company:
Pat Catterson
NOW.
a new dance performance/installation event
directed and choreographed by Pat Catterson
Saturday + Sunday, January 30 + 31, 2016 at 12Noon
Admission $15 Reservations at Brown Paper Tickets
NYU Tisch School of the Arts
111 2nd Avenue, 4th flr
New York, NY
NOW. is a multimedia / performance / installation event directed and choreographed by Pat Catterson in collaboration with dance media artist Paul Galando and presented by NYU Tisch Dance and New Media Department. This immersive performance captures dancers in single moments in time and place performing simultaneously both in real and virtual time.
NOW. explores the evolving intimacy of dance in a world of new media where dancers in New York perform live alongside life-size Skype projections of dancers in real-time from multiple cities around the world including Argentina, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Holland, Japan and Norway.
NOW. addresses the faux intimacy that media creates and in which we are immersed daily. We are connected by phantom representations of one another, real in the sense that they can be communicative, and yet not real as these projected essence lack physical weight and presence.
NOW. captures time as one elastic substance and embraces the perfect imperfections within both body and technology.
NOW. is an experience across borders of time and distance, presenting ideas of live-ness, time, and the individuation and bonding inherent in the sharing of movement. The duets, solos and group sections of this piece will unfold over three sites, with the audience free to move from one to the other, as well as to interact with the international cast of dancers.
Over the last eight years, Pat Catterson has been fine-tuning a creative process that embraces rather than defies dance’s ephemerality and seeks to rediscover the dancer as a full artist rather than as a well-tooled machine executing steps. Her recent choreography is a reflection on philosophical ideas of sense of self and on how to emphasize live-ness in performances for both the audience and for the dancers without resorting to improvisation. Her interest in philosophy (her minor in undergraduate studies) and its intersections with neuroscience and physics today, continue to inspire her work. Catterson began her career in the dance world at the Judson Church in the late 1960s. This, her 108th dance, is a production where all her interests coalesce.
“As I get older,” Catterson says, “I experience time differently. Of course there is the cliché that time feels to pass more quickly the older one gets. It is an acceleration that makes one feel the unity of past present and future, as if they are becoming one, or always were one elastic substance. I more intensely experience the present, albeit within a sea of recollections. The present is what is here NOW for me, or more accurately, when I am.”
Photo of of Pat Catterson in "Keepsake"by Otto M. Berk.
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