Past Sponsored Projects
Glen Jennings
sponsored project: occult videography
Occult Videography will be using the medium of digital video and photography to explore the mysticism of occult imagery. Through the exploration of various video techniques including graphics, green screening, time lapsing and light writing he hopes to create a style that is a macabre techno-noir under the guise of "music videos." The end show will feature several single channel video screenings, performance, and a spatial/sound installation. His question: "If we can use these digital mediums to forge an illusion of mysticism in the minds of the viewer, does the mysticism then somehow become real?"
J. Thomas Pallas
sponsored project: Untitled
J. Thomas Pallas' work will explore the line between commercial imagery, such as advertising, and community empowerment through new bodies of work in printmaking, drawing, and collage. The imagery he will be using is an amalgamation of personal photos and advertising images from the 70s and 80s in an effort to mine notions of childhood, both the personal and represented.
New Beast Theatre Works
sponsored project: light waves and their uses
New Beast Theatre Works' newest semi-opera explores the life of scientist Albert Michelson. Michelson, famous for his measurement of the velocity of light, was infamous for a devotion to his work that caused him to neglect himself and his family, and which ultimately led to his institutionalization. With a script devised by the players, a score for sixteen pieces and five voices, projections, dance, and magic, the company will create Michelson's imaginative world, his dreams, his mental illness, and discover what it looks like for a family to cope with genius and madness.
Congo Square Theater
sponsored project: brothers of the dust
Set in rural Kansas, Brothers of The Dust, a new play written by Darren Canady, chronicles the homecoming of two brothers returning to the family farm to stake their claim to share of farm land that has been in the family for generations, and maintained by their oldest sibling Roy. While coming home can be exciting, this homecoming is anything but, as conflict ensues over protecting the family legacy and as the brothers deal with past demons and a complicated family history.
Fifth House Ensemble
sponsored project: the weaver's tales
A Unique Twist on Grimm’s Fairytales, The Weaver’s Tales Incorporates Music, Storytelling and a Feast for the Eyes in Physical Theater and Fashion Design. The Weaver’s Tales is a unique multi-media theatrical adventure that seamlessly weaves together three storylines by combining fairy tales, physical theater, dance, high fashion and music, in a three-part work that will captivate audiences with a full-sensory experience. Through these world premiere performance experiences we have strived to go beyond theater or even ‘musical theater’ into the world of living musical performance art.
Kate Raney
Kate’s films and videos investigate issues of identity, gender and self. In The Cleo Project, multiple women will enact the same scene from Agnes Varda’s film Cleo From 5 to 7. Each actress will be given direction and adjustments on set as action is called while cameras document the actress as well as the director. Combining video, film and animation, this project will capture the moments when the actresses deal with the complex negotiation between performing femininity and embodying the self.
Manual Cinema
MANUAL CINEMA is a collaboration between puppeteers/graphic artists Julia Miller, Drew Dir, and Sarah Fornace with musician/composers Kyle Vegter and Ben Kauffman. Their process combines handmade shadow puppetry, cinematic motifs, and live sound manipulation to create immersive theatrical stories. Their tools are paper, acetate, ink, light, air pressure, and overhead projectors. They love dreamscapes, landscapes, sound-scapes, feet, hands, space, small delicate sounds, and animating the inanimate.
Loni Diep
Loni Diep is an artist who explores the ideas of body and narrative through book and paper. Through papermaking and bookbinding sculptures are created to narrate various themes on society, human behavior and perception, and cross cultural observations.
Katharine Hawthorne / Christopher Jette
SoundLines is a performance installation that maps movement to sound. A grayscale version of a live video matrix is read in two changing horizontal positions. These lines become waveforms forming the basis for the scored sound improvisation. The dancer’s movements change the waveform, shaping pitch and timbre. Just as a guitar string is plucked by a pick and the wooden body shapes and amplifies the sound, the dancer's movement actuates sound, resonating in physical space. SoundLines explores the human body interacting with digital space and reveals the implied forces that, like gravity or resistance, constrain movement.
Molly Shanahan / Mad Shak
sponsored project: stamina of a curiosity
Stamina of Curiousty is Molly Shanahan’s current three-year project including solo and ensemble movement research and multiple performance iterations. Shanahan is further refining her singular approach to movement, which challenges contemporary notions of fitness and physique. Stamina will allow Shanahan and her collaborators to explore how the body’s inherent intelligence can be harnessed to through-compose movement and to spontaneously structure performance. By blurring the lines between the creative process and “finished work” Stamina invites performers and audiences alike to reconsider form in dance, notions of virtuosity, and the meaning of presentation vis-a-vis a dynamic exchange between dancer and audience.
Adam Rose
Adam is the Artistic Director of Antibody Dance, a company specializing in movement arts and occult research. He is a graduate of Antioch College (2008), where he earned a B.A. in Dance/Theater. He has shown work at many venues and events in Chicago including the MDW Fair, DEFIBRILLATOR, Garbage World, the 1901 Gallery/Theatre, praxis place, and in Mexico at the Festival de Teatro Susana Alexander. He was awarded a 2009 LinkUp Artist Residency and is currently a 2011 Chicago Dancemakers Forum Greenhouse artist.
Julia A. Miller
Julia A. Miller is a composer, guitarist, electronic musician, poet, VJ/ancient technologist, and curator. Poetry and the voice live at the heart of Julia's work, and poetic documents as scores, performative objects, and new media poetics are part of Julia's ongoing exploration into the hybridization of voice, instruments, electronics, and video to create an organic whole from one source of material (her voice).
Joe Miller
Year-long Artist-In-Residence in Visual Art
Chicago native Joe Miller is a visual artist with a primary focus in painting and drawing. Through collaborations with city officials, journalists, filmmakers, homeless and you, Miller examines the city structures and mediums that mediate our not-so-everyday perception of the city’s political and economic operations. Recent projects include: The Empty Bubble Residency and Unity, a show comprised of works by he and fellow artist J. Thomas Pallas. He also works as a freelance artist, creating set designs, murals, paintings and more.
HCL provided audience development, office space, studio space, production assistance, and marketing for Joe. In collaboration with Joe, HCL produced the art shows Browntown, and Unity #1 and #2.
Jeremy Bessoff
Artist-In-Residence in Video/Film
Jeremy Bessoff breathes life into his images and sculptures with the magic of motion-picture technology. He is interested in documenting the secret communication that goes on between inanimate objects. Certain objects, whether found or created, can be imbibed with or already exude a certain esoteric memory. It is this ready-made history that Jeremy finds so intriguing. At times he has been considered a surrealist. Bessoff says that, “Surreality is the refuge of the emotionally inarticulate” but is currently keeping his options open. He is currently exploring the roots of modern masculinity through the Western genre by way of a plastic Cowboys and Indians play set.
Ka-Tet Theatre Company
Artists-In-Residence in Theater
Ka-Tet Theatre Company produces ensemble-driven theatre focusing on a strong collaboration and cohesion between actors, directors and designers. The company was founded in 2008 by Purdue Theatre alums Dan Meisner and Suzanne Miller. The name of the company, Ka-Tet, means a group of people brought together by Ka, or fate, to achieve a common goal. Their belief is that theatre is a collective experience, that theater should be visceral; felt first and intellectualized later. Ka-Tet welcomes the audience to bring their own unique collective experiences and energies to form, every performance.
Dal Niente
Artist-In-Residence in Music
Dal Niente was founded by composer Kirsten Broberg in 2004 at Northwestern University and has become one of the country’s leading new music organizations. Its members believe that we live in a unique and inspiring musical era and are committed to fostering a positive and vital creative interchange. The ensemble presents the best of music being written today by established, emerging, and as-yet-undiscovered composers. It commissions new works, gives countless premieres, and champions great but neglected compositions — all in addition to regularly performing contemporary and 20th century masterpieces to bring this truly exceptional music to enthusiastic audiences.
2009-2010
Pavement Group
Pavement Group commits itself to providing dynamic performance opportunities for the next generation of theatre artists, arts managers, and audiences. We dedicate ourselves to new plays. Pavement Group endeavors to make contact with an audience previously unspoken to. We strive to lay the foundation–both pragmatic and institutional–that fosters fresh plays and makes contact with new audiences. Through development, dramaturgy, and the pairing of playwrights and directors, Pavement Group provides the artistic and practical atmosphere needed for great plays to reach fruition.
Opera Cabal
Opera Cabal creates and performs concert music, opera and theater, drawing its reperhighconceptlaboratories.org 21st centuries, exploring works of emerging and established composers and writers, and breathing new life into compelling older repertoire. A resource for emerging performers, Opera Cabal creates opportunities for those with a vested interest in contemporary musical performance at the highest artistic level. The ensemble brings its work to unlikely venues, aiming to broaden the audience for contemporary performance.
http://operacabal.blogspot.com/
Molly Jaeger
Molly is a performing artist in dance theater. Her performance practice is grounded in the techniques developed by pioneering teacher, Scott Kelman, with whom she studied intensively from 2001-2004, before branching off to devise her own work. Previously, her efforts have been focused on developing ensemble improvisational techniques, which she performed in around public spaces in Portland OR, her former home, and in the UK as part of a long term collaboration with The Kelman Group. Her performances have also been seen in Canada and at the Festival of New American Theatre in the UK. In addition to performing, Molly also teaches technique for improvisation and performance. She has led workshops at Leeds University Workshop Theatre in the UK, the National Theater of Colombia in Bogota, The Circus Center in Boulder CO and in Portland OR.
Jason Ponce
Jason Ponce is a new media artist, musician, and interactive technology researcher. His sound and video installations have been produced internationally, and highlight the many intersections between art and science, especially interactivity, gesture and cognition. He is currently a researcher at the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), a recording engineer at Warren Studios in San Diego, and a PhD candidate in Computer Music at UC San Diego.
Jason recently premiered his new interactive light and sound installation FLOX at HCL. Photos of the work can be seen here.
