Second Nature
Company:
Company SoGoNo
Contact: Tanya Calamoneri (718) 207-3307
tanya@sogono.org
Location:
Triskelion Arts
18 North 11th Street, 3rd Floor (btwn Berry & Wythe)
Brooklyn, NY 11211
L train to Bedford Ave
Ticketing information:
www.triskelionarts.org
For reservations email info@triskelionarts.org or call (718) 599-3577
Triskelion Arts Presents
Company SoGoNo in
SECOND NATURE
Tanya Calamoneri, Cassie Tunick, Heather Harpham, Danny Tunick, Owen Walker
Dec 2-4, 2011 [Fri & Sat] at 8PM, [Sun] at 7PM
Admission: 5 (2 Students)
Brooklyn, NY, December 2011 – Triskelion Arts presents three evenings of performance by Company SoGoNo, whose members specialize in a unique form of physical and musical improvisation. Remarkable individual solo artists in the realms of theater, music, and dance, these performers collaborate on three tightly woven and diversely improvised shows. Each performance integrates movement, vocalization, speech, and instrumental music into present expression. The pieces are visually surreal travelogues of the ordinary - made extraordinary by acute attention to sensory detail, rhythm, space, sound, and altered states of mind.
Company SoGoNo's creations expand the realm of what one usually anticipates from improvisation to include an elegant cohesion and collective sophistication in composition that rivals the most thoughtfully assembled set work. The pieces are beautiful and strange, funny, dark, poetic, potent, and real. There is an organic nature to how the action unfolds, executed with a precise articulation and passionate immediacy, which reveals an essentialized humanity at the core of these ferociously, sometimes delicately imagined works.
Employing an embodied vocabulary that draws from contemporary dance-theater, Ruth Zaporah’s Action Theater, Japanese Butoh dance, contemporary classical music, experimental rock and found music, Second Nature uses archetypal and pedestrian characters/events to examine a landscape that doubles back on itself as it rolls forward. This is a more non-linear world, akin to dream, where the meaning is made in how images collide, and from the performer's imaginations. Performers Cassie Tunick, Heather Harpham, Owen Walker, and Tanya Calamoneri, use a few spare props to locate content both abstract and realistic, always anchored in an idiosyncratic physicality. The essential poignancy and difficulty of being human is mined for a Chaplin-esque style and Flannery O'Connor-like gothic, rendered with humor and crafted with an eye to the larger concerns of the human race and its nature.
The quintet has been working together in separate incarnations from five to as many as twenty-five years and is unusually fine-tuned to each other while being deeply committed to the moment of surprise. United as a group in finding delight in simple gestures, sounds, and words, the musical accompaniment and counter-point of Mr. Tunick and his vibraphone, marimba, guitars, keyboards, accordion, and other percussion instruments creates a tight sound-mesh with the vocalizations of the performers and a layer of aural theatricality.
Company SoGoNo has presented work at Brooklyn Museum, Irondale Center, 3LD Art & Technology Center, Ontological Incubator, Triskelion Arts, CAVE and the NY Butoh Festival, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Culture Project, Movement Research, CRS, and 92nd St Y, among other venues in NY, as well as Links Hall in Chicago and Urban Guild in Kyoto, Japan.
Second Nature is supported in part through grants from American Music Center’s Live Music for Dance and the New York State Council on the Arts New Theater Advancement program.
