Performance Works NorthWest premieres Linda Austin's A HEAD OF TIME, a performance work that sifts together an unpredictable variety of serenely methodical, energetically agile, gesturally detailed, and playfully awkward dance movement; a set comprised of 300 stacked blankets; video imagery; original and stolen text, and a sound score by Seth Nehil in a charting of internal and external time. The ensemble of 8 dancer teases out the tensions between the finite, vulnerable body and the vast expanses of past and future time within us---all of it jostling with our flickering focus on the present moment. Throughout---as the dancers gobble up space and time with their dancing, singing, mumbling, humming, gesturing, declaiming---big notions of Time-Space-Body-Mortality-Memory-Consciousness meet the bittersweet humor of the everyday.
These performances of A HEAD OF TIME are supported in part by the Regional Arts & Culture Council and Work for Art.
Choreography (in collaboration with the dancers): Linda Austin Dancers: Linda Austin, Philippe Bronchtein, Jin Camou, Catherine Egan, Keyon Gaskin, Esther LaPointe, Danielle Ross & Lucy Yim. Sound Score: Seth Nehil Video: Linda Austin & Karl Lind Lighting: Jeff Forbes
LINDA AUSTIN BIO Linda Austin, co-founder & director of Performance Works NorthWest in Portland, OR, has been making dance and performance since 1983. Her poetic, unconventionally witty, and rigorously conceived works arise from an ongoing fascination with the body's awkward, lyrical and often accidental beauty. The resultant works have been performed in New York, Mexico City, Seattle and Portland, at venues such as the Danspace Project, PS 122, Movement Research at Judson Church, the Kitchen, On the Boards and PICA's TBA Festival.
In addition to Fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts and the Oregon Arts Commission, Linda's work has been supported by the Regional Arts & Culture Council, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, and Movement Research, as well as through residencies at Djerassi and Robert Wilson's Watermill Center. Her writing has appeared in The Movement Research Performance Journal, Tierra Adentro (Mexico), the literary journal FO A RM and a 2003 collection from MIT Press, Women, Art & Technology.
Recent projects include the 2010 Paired Spectacular, an homage to dance pioneers Yvonne Rainer and Deborah Hay; the 2009 Bandage a Knife, a collaboration with Seth Nehil inspired by a Japanese cult noir film; and a 2008 site-specific dance at Portland's Lovejoy Fountain as part of The City Dance of Anna & Lawrence Halprin, performed in the 2008 TBA Festival. An in-progress version of A head of time and a 6-week installation of this project was featured at The Art Gym in April 2011 as part of an exhibit devoted to the choreographic process titled "Dance: before, after, during."
In addition to creating and performing dance, and running Performance Works, Linda also teaches in the ESOL program at Portland Community College.
PERFORMANCE WORKS NORTHWEST advances the performing arts in the Pacific Northwest through the development of contemporary performance, artists and audiences. As an artist-run incubator for live and media arts, PWNW simultaneously nurtures local artists and provides opportunities for Portland OR audiences and artists to engage with nationally renowned performers and their work.
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