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Event
Living Canvas Rx
Living Canvas Rx: "Fearless performers celebrating the inherent beauty of all sorts of human forms. Interesting projection designs exquisite use of lighting a polished performance art piece. Recommended." -- Chicago Critic
The Living Canvas, known for nude actors telling theatrical stories with their bodies clothed in brilliant projections, looks at our obsession with drug journeys exploratory and necessary, recreational and compulsory, enlightening and entrapping.
Living Canvas Rx gets its name from the symbol for prescription, which originated as an abbreviation of the Late Latin verb recipe, the imperative form of recipere "to take." All of us are drug users in some way. If you watch TV, every commercial break mentions at least once to ask your doctor if some medicine is right for you. The radio yammers about free trials and studies. We get fixes from the local drugstore, from basement gardens, or street corner entrepreneurs. We seek things that make us happy sex, religion, television, chocolate, marijuana, wine, cocaine. What does it mean that this is such a universal search? And what makes one person's medicine more socially acceptable than another's?
Every Living Canvas production naturally promotes body acceptance and the expressive power of the body, utilizing unclothed performers who become the textures projected onto them, or are sculpted with stark light and shadow. The use of movement and sound help tell the stories. The performers are both vulnerable and empowered through their nudity, which led to the ensemble's idea to tell stories about a similar relationship with drugs.
The cast and production team of Living Canvas Rx includes:
Cast: Hope Barnes, Miles Benjamin Barrett, Katie Carnes, Laura Elleseg, Cassandra Hannan, Nicole Jordan, Isaac Samuelson, Ben Schlotfelt, Sarah Smith, Kelly Steik.
Production team: Lisa Adams and Jack Dugan Carpenter (co-directors), Melissa Schlesinger (sound designer), John Jacobsen (lighting designer), Pete Guither (projections designer), Miona Lee (movement consultant), Kit Ryan (stage manager).
Performances of Living Canvas Rx are August 1 through August 17, 2014, Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m., and Sundays at 6:00 p.m. at the Den Theatre's Studio 2B, 1333 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago. Tickets are $20 each and available at Brown Paper Tickets (livingcanvas.brownpapertickets.com) or at the door. Following each performance is a Q&A with the cast and an optional opportunity for audience members to disrobe and see what it's like to be a living canvas in the projections.
Some reviews of past Living Canvas shows:
"Pete Guither's high-def projections of intricate patterns across naked actors is eye candy on the order of a laser-light show..." -- Time Out Chicago
"intriguing and fanciful... feast for the eyes..." -- Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times
"Stoners, Dali fans, sensualists of every stripe, this show's for you. Sober or otherwise, you'll find the visual pleasures of Guither's idiom considerable, the kinetic sculpture consistently engrossing as choreographer Mark Hackman makes the most of the cast's varying backgrounds in movement and dance." -- Brian Nemtusak, Chicago Reader
"...intensely peculiar and mesmerizing... It's riveting." -- Nina Metz, Chicago Tribune
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LocationThe Den Theatre, Studio 2B
1333 N. Milwaukee Ave
Chicago, IL 60622
United States
Categories
Kid Friendly: No |
Dog Friendly: No |
Non-Smoking: Yes! |
Wheelchair Accessible: No |
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