Première of All Blues at the Baryshnikov Arts Center
Company:
Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC)
We are pleased to announce the première of All Blues at the Baryshnikov Arts Center at 450 West 37th Street on June 11-12, 2015. All Blues is an evening-length colorist performance created by Beau Rhee. The piece expresses the broad complexities of the color blue through movement, music, set and costumes, and olfactive elements.
Rhee began her inquiry into the color blue in 2013. Blue as an infinite experience, as a fundamental way in which we experience the world. She observed its transcendental potential: sacred or celestial, bold or banal. Working, courageous, depressed, elevated blue...
All Blues is a living kinesthetic collage, a total sensory environment, comprised of all of these blues. In rehearsals, movement was the primary language to drive expression. The choreography stems from vernacular gestures that link back to the color: a blues guitarists’ moans, a workers repetitive motions, geometries on celestial maps. Arms create geometric motifs that repeat and reinvent themselves. Each performer brings their own universe of movement and sound, creating a jazz-like troupe, where individual voices exchange in the score and through improvisation. The costumes & sets, as well as the olfactive elements, are designed to further express the artistic themes in visual and sensory media.
This rich assemblage of visual, aural and olfactive elements is the eco-system of Atelier de Geste, a dance company and design studio. Beau Rhee’s artistic practice stems from the notion that our daily rituals of living and choreographed movement are not so far off from each other. The act of putting on a shirt, or the movement of a shimmy, or the spritz of a perfume, all go back to humans living. They are movements that can be studied through choreography, textile, and so on. Rhee’s practice is influenced heavily by the “colorists” Yves Klein and Sonia Delaunay. Color and living geometries as basic building blocks for her oeuvre. The tanz-theatre of Pina Bausch & the narrative yet abstract assemblage of Bill T Jones (under whom she apprenticed) informs her choreography. Her work has been shown at venues X-Initiative/DIA, Musée d’art et d’histoire, Musée Ariana, la Maison Blanche de le Corbusier, Kunsthaus Baselland.
All Blues marks the first large-scale performance in New York City with her new company, Atelier de Geste. Please join us.
CAST:
Dancers: Chantal Chadwick, Ella Misko, Kay Ottinger, Beau Rhee
Musicians: Jason Anastanoff, Lathan Hardy, Mara Mayer
Visual Artists: Emilie Lundstrom & Alex Wolkowicz/Cat Lauigan of Cave Collective
Choreography/Artistic Direction/Design: Beau Rhee
Curator: Katherine Chan
We welcome your messages:
General Inquiries / PR : performance@atelierdegeste.com
Please include “All Blues” in your subject line.
“Atelier de Geste is a unique place...where movement forms the center of a constellation of aesthetic practices and concerns including visual art, fashion, and fragrance. Inspired by the 20th century artist/ designer workshops of legendary figures such as Sonia Delaunay and Eileen Gray, founder Beau Rhee engages the modernist avant-garde ideal of “art as life” with a new and fresh vision by connecting color, scent, and objects to gesture and human emotion.”
-Katherine Chan, art critic & director at Miguel Abreu Gallery
