Chez Bushwick Presents: Myriam Gourfink

January 11-13, 7:30PM
CPR
361 Manhattan Avenue, Unit 1
Chez Bushwick presents acclaimed French choreographer Myriam Gourfink's Corbeau (US Premiere), Marine (US Premiere) and Breathing Monster (NYC Premiere).
Produced by Chez Bushwick with support from: French-US Exchange in Dance (FUSED), Cultural Services of the French Embassy, American Friends of the Paris Opera Ballet/Young Artists Fund, Mertz Gilmore Foundation, King's Fountain, New York Community Trust, Foundation for Contemporary Art, and… Show more the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Dates: January 11 12, 2012 / 7:30pm / Corbeau and Marine
January 13, 2012 / 7:30pm / Breathing Monster
Tickets: $12 advance / $15 day of show
Myriam Gourfink's unique work blends computer-choreography with yoga techniques, exploring micro-movements while challenging conventional notions of dance. In less than ten years Gourfink has become one of Europe's leading contemporary choreographers, known for work that requires extreme physical control and results in a strange and boundless beauty. Every movement, every look, every breath is meticulously pre-determined to the millimeter, enabling the dancer's body to move along a measured and fascinating path. Gourfink's work unfurls like a wave, a long vibration that echoes the music that accompanies it.
About the performances
Corbeau
Duration: 30 minutes
Choreographer: Myriam Gourfink
Dancer: Gwenaëlle Vauthier
Composer Musician: Kasper T. Toeplitz
In Corbeau ("Crow"), Gourfink draws upon the virtuosity of ballet while exploring the limits of slow micro-movements. This title of this solo for Gwenaëlle Vauthier, dancer at the Ballet de l'Opéra national of Paris is a play on the words "corps beau" (French for "beautiful body") with a nod to the overrepresentation of white birds in ballet, manifesting instead the black bird's equally graceful existence.
"The idea is to base the choreography on the dancer's ability to elevate her legs, in order to focus on an area which is rarely accessible with contemporary dancers. I want to work on a dance playing on the extremely slow unfurling of the dancer's four limbs through space, thus imparting form to that space by embarking along subtle, unexpected directions, created by the projection of the dancer's body inside spherical volumes, and by accepting the 360 degrees of the circle as an arena of limitless sensorial possibilities."
During most of the piece, the dancer supports herself with one leg, while extending the rest of her body into the surrounding environment of air. The body's architecture, and extending the body to its furthest limits into the surrounding air, are closely connected to and partially derive from the music spaces created by Composer Kasper T. Toeplitz. Gourfink is fascinated by the spaces the sound renders for dancing peripheral spaces whose fuzzy edges are defined by the range covered by the sound. The story of Chinese emperors who scaled palaces according to the range covered by a sound produced in a central point, has become Gourfink's story. Starting from the immateriality of a space created by sound vibrations, from its elasticity spanning from miniscule to infinite, Gourfink create spheres into which the body extends itself.
Marine
Duration: 30 minutes
Choreographer Dancer: Myriam Gourfink
Composer Musician: Kasper T. Toeplitz
Costumes: Kova
Marine is a solo full of sensory exchanges, organized breathing, physical and emotional tensions, and supports. Marine embodies an elastic purification of movement millimeter by millimeter. Of breathtaking beauty, Gourfink is again focused on breathing and internal movements, creating a work that vibrates to a subsonic score and literally opens up space.
Breathing Monster
Duration: 40 minutes
Choreographer Dancer: Myriam Gourfink
Composer Musician: Kasper T. Toeplitz
An evening-length work of abstracted, hypnotic movement and sound, Toeplitz improvises on electronic bass to explore the frontiers between pitch, noise, oscillations and stillness, while Gourfink uses meticulous internal visualizations to manifest an evolving, interconnected series of micro-movements. Toeplitz has developed a body of work in the no-man's-land between academic electronic composition and sheer noise, and is known for collaborating with such unclassifiable musicians as Zbigniew Karkowski, Dror Feiler, Art Zoyd, Éliane Radigue, Phill Niblock and Ulrich Krieger. Toeplitz utilizes the computer as instrument, and as a tool for reflecting on music differently, transforming the musical parameters of pitch data and temporality.
Chez Bushwick, Inc., Producing Nonprofit Founded and guided by artists, Chez Bushwick is an award-winning nonprofit organization committed to fostering the development, research, and presentation of new performance works across disciplines.

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