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Viscera Dance Theatre
strives to make a provocative contribution by way of an intersection of exotic dance, modern dance, multimedia art forms, and a darkly dramaticaesthetic to the dialogue within our culture concerning the violence and socio-political structures that shape sexuality and identity. Annie Vereen and Jack Kirven are the founders and creative force behind Viscera Dance Theatre.
Jack Kirven, a recovering native of rural Georgia, attended Coker College where he completed B.A. degrees in both Dance and French simultaneously in 1998 (while systematically driving Dr. Bolden nearly insane in the process). He was valedictorian of his class (mostly because everyone else at Coker was drunk all the time). Jack completed his MFA in 2002 at the Department of World Arts and Cultures (WAC, re: “wack”) at UCLA. While working on his advanced degree he studied, taught, choreographed and performed across the USA (Ooooh!) and Europe (Aaaah!). As a professional Jack has worked with several artists and companies, most of whom you’ll have never heard of and don’t care about. He was a founding artistic director of the Royal Corkscrew Dance Theatre in New York City, which never did anything and is included here to make him sound more important than he is. Jack was a high school teacher for two excruciatingly long years, and then a college professor at six universities. He realized he wouldn’t wish the American education system on his worst enemies, and is happy to admit his life is far less complicated now that he’s a porn star. He still wants to be Janet Jackson when he grows up.
Annie Vereen, another victim of rural Georgia, attended Winthrop University for a B.A. in Dance Education, but decided she’d rather be homeless than put up with the public schools in South Carolina. Since graduation, she has moved to the big city to teach, choreograph, and contribute to a stronger artistic community in Charlotte (as she leaps tall buildings in a single bound… in stiletto pumps with rhinestones). She became an exotic dance instructor, has taught at several exotic dance studios in the region, and now runs her own exotic dance studio, and completely rocks the short shorts. She is a lead activist for Greenpeace, and totally got arrested at Duke Energy Headquarters to bring awareness of the detriment of coal plants and mountaintop removal has on our planet. Annie is a trained singer, and totally shreds the Tori Amos jams. She has worked with many innovative photographers as a model, and she plays the violin as well as four years of practice and instruction can give her. Recently, Annie blew everyone’s minds in her floral design classes (where she avoided baby’s breath at all costs, and to good effect), and her impromptu faerie houses please the faeries. www.VisceraDanceTheatre.com
V&B
is cathartic healing experience after the end of a long term relationship. It is autobiographical in inspiration; however, it has been choreographed in such a manner as to be more readily accessible to anyone who has ever experienced disappointment, loss, or abandonment at the hands of a significant
other. Music by Tori Amos.
Suites for the (bitter)sweet:Codependence
is a collection of dances set to music by Led Zeppelin that focuses on some of the ways in which love can become dysfunctional.
Things that Go Bump in the Night
A re-telling of the time when Annie and her college boyfriend were haunted while camping in the Pisgah National Forest.
Stephanie Patrick
is an Austin, Texas native. She began her dance training at age three, and continued her study during college at the University of Oklahoma, at The Edge while living in Los Angeles after graduation, and through three summers doing a work/study program at Steps On Broadway in New York City. For its 2011-2012 season, Stephanie was an apprentice with Tapestry Dance Company. This year she dances with Asheville Contemporary Dance Theatre. For the company’s Dia de los Muertos performance in November, she choreographed hip-hop pieces for the adult and “tween” companies. For ACDT’s production of“The Nutcracker and the Mouse King.”, Stephanie played Fritz and choreographed two hip-hop pieces for teenage and children performers. This is her fourth year of teaching tap, jazz, ballet, and hip-hop.
Casee Hogg has been dancing since she was 5. She danced professionally with Idaho Dance Theatre for 3 years. Following her time in Idaho, she moved to New York City where she danced with a few small companies. She attended the Mark Norris and Alvin Ailey summer intensives. She is a company member of Asheville Contemporary Dance Theatre, with which she played Mother and The Mouse Queen in the recent production “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King.”
It’s Alright Now
is about a girl feeling left behind by the people in her life. Her expression of this frustration alternates between a temper tantrum and a desperate need to be accepted. At the lowest point of her loneliness, she finally sees another individual through her fog of inner struggle—but is it a new friend or her own self that comes to save her?
Abigail Griffin
is a multimedia movement artist whose background is rooted in years of formal and informal study of traditional and non-traditional dance and movement forms as well as over 10 years of study, practice, performance, and teaching experience with poi and flag dancing, and and the fire arts. She is currently a student at UNC Asheville studying new media, dance, and art and has a particular interest in authentic movement, rites of passage, butoh, phenomenology, and the intersection of technology and performance.
Jennifer Bennett
is a new media artist with a diverse background in mapping, architecture, teaching, graphic arts and video production. In her 15 years or so in this line of work, has helped produce projects ranging from green homes to educational materials to objets d'art to large-scale, time-based installations. She is currently a New Media student at UNC Asheville with current interest in stage production and performance.
Emergence
is a dance and New Media performance piece created by multimedia artists Abigail Griffin and Jennifer Bennett. This 3-minute performance is inspired by the incredible life cycle of the Tulip Tree Silkmoth and the process of coming into one's own creative process. "Emergence" is an allegory of time and transformation, projected on character and canvas for and includes butoh inspired time-lapsed movement, flag dancing, poi fire spinning, and beautifully inspiring visuals.
Ted Pope
in the afternoon ted pope felt he was a sweating horse
rushing through the dry grass
testing reeds at the waters edge
seed-heads, swaying and bowing
kowtowing, to the wind
pressing bare back
for no reason, taking
a chunk of metamorphic
rock infested with mica, he
hefts it with all might into the lake
the surface breaks and it disappears
the ripples subside and there is no sign
take heart. hardly matters what i think. i like crayons and bread freshly baked potatoes and documentaries about mining colonies, baseball, treese.
Shamanistic Androgyny
The catalyst for the piece came in the form of writer and Black Mountain College graduate Michael Rumaker’s description of a group of avant guard artists working in experimental and visionary ways and yet carrying at times an infection from the outside into their idyllic learning and working environment. Rumaker describes artists as at times “infected” with many of the conservative and traditional attitudes of 1950’s American Culture especially attitudes towards women and homosexuality.
Lindsey Kelley
likes to move her bod... a lot. She began her training with the Northwest Florida Ballet, attended the University of South Florida to receive a B.F.A. in Dance Performance, moved to NYC to dance for various companies and independent choreographers, and relocated to Asheville, where she has been busy teaching, choreographing and performing. Her work has been presented at the Diana Wortham Theatre, North Carolina Dance Festival, Links Hall in Chicago, Meredith College in Raleigh and St. Marks Church, STEPS on Broadway and Triskelion Arts Festival in NYC. Lindsey currently teaches dance for the Asheville Ballet, ACDT, Warren Wilson College and Revolution Dance in Gray, TN. For a complete bio, please visit www.indseykelleydance.com
shake it proper
Choreography by Lindsey Kelley with Dancers
Performers: Amy Brown, Lindsey Kelley and Fleming Lomax
About the piece: randomness + trial & error + choreographic inspiration from people and environment + technicality + moving dem bones + nonsense + life experience + focus & intention + variety + spacial awareness + contact + 3 dancing ladies = shake it proper.
Julian Vorus
is an Asheville-based poet, playwright and performer. He is also
is the manager of Downtown Books and News.
Red Black White
a triptych of the bizarre, by Julian Vorus, is presented in partnership with The Magnetic Theatre. Using nontraditional methods to expose the complex psyches of three good friends coming to grips with the wonders and horrors of experiences that have made them who they are today, as they attempt to break free of the past in order to progress in the present. The frightening author of 2011’s Rock Saber returns with a performance piece directed by Steve Samuels and featuring Mr. Vorus, Mary Zogzas, and John Crutchfield. With music by Zogzas.
Onkel Woland
Your LaZoom Fringe tour Master of Ceremonies
Onkel Woland, leader of The Black Forest Menagerie, brings to life dark and mischievous fairytales and other phenomena for very naughty children.
Moving Women
Founded in 2007, Moving Women is a dance performance ensemble that honors and invites the diverse perspectives offered by cross-genre collaboration. Core members challenge themselves by working with other dancers, visual artists, musicians, poets, actors, and performance artists to create original performance pieces.
Kathy Meyers Leiner
Kathy received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance Performance and Choreography in the 80’s and has been teaching, performing, and choreographing ever since. She currently is an adjunct in the UNCA
Dance Minor Program, director of The Asheville School Dance Program, where she also manages Graham Theater, and is a founding member of Moving Women
www.movingwomen.org. She recently started a new business, UpStyled Place Setting, vintage china rental and staging company www.upstyledsetting.com
and continues her love of choreographed places with a new medium. Kathy is so grateful for the beauty of Asheville, her amazing children, loving husband, wonderful friends, and the oppurtunity to create in the many spaces of her life.
Jenni Cockrell
received her Master of Arts in Dance and Women's Studies from the University of North Carolina Greensboro in 2002. She is a founding member of Moving Women and danced with Asheville Contemporary Dance Theatre for a decade. Recently, Jenni began her own Butoh solo company, “strange
daughters,” in which she strives to create unique works investigating the quirkiness and rawness of what it means to be human.
Forbidden or Only
Moving Women’s Kathy Meyers Leiner and Jenni Cockrell present an experiment of searching through layers of sentiment, disintegration and the journey of the soul. This installation of movement, body and symbol examines the nostalgia of choices we make as beings and the personal battles that evolve from these choices.
Bromelia
is a small collective of dancers and aerialists exploring the intersection of land and sky. The group formed in the spring of 2012 and performed their first full-length show in December. Bromelia's choreography is rooted in circus arts and modern dance and created collaboratively by the dancers, resulting in incredibly unique work.
The Nature of the Nature of Things
These are selected pieces from their recent full-length show. Aerial slings and lyra (aerial hoop) are used to enhance groundwork and explore vertical space onstage. Each piece revolves around a question, resulting in dance that can be whimsical, heartbreaking, and fantastical.
Catherine Altice
is a multimedia artist who, more often than not, incorporates painting, drawing, sewing, stitching, fiber art and photography into her two-dimensional and three-dimensional works. She received her Master of Fine Arts Degree (graduating with honors) in Studio Art from Johnson State College / Vermont Studio Center, 2011 and her Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Painting and Printmaking from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 1990. Catherine is also an Appalachian State Alumnus and holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Mass Communications in Advertising and Marketing in 1987.
Turleen
will be a lovely vision of sunny, happy, silly, playfulness.
Julie Becton Gillum, Sara Baird
and Valeria Watson-Doost
As founder of three modern dance companies and finally Legacy Butoh, Julie Becton Gillum has been creating, performing and teaching dance in the US, France, Cuba and Mexico for over 40 years. She currently teaches modern dance, musical theatre, performance art and butoh at Warren Wilson College. Gillum’s primary form of artistic expression has become butoh, which she has been practicing, performing and teaching since 1998.
Sara Baird is the artistic director, choreographer and a dancer with Anemone Dance Theater, www.anemonedance.org. Baird layers video projections, original music, and sculptural costumes to create multimedia Butoh inspired dances and she seeks out artistic collaborators. To date, ADT has more than 25 original dances in the repertory. In 2007, Baird was chosen by master Akira Kasai to perform at the The Japan Society in his commission, Butoh America. Dancing professionally for 20 years, Baird has produced many NYC seasons and toured the U.S., South America, and Europe.
Born in Denver, Colorado, Valeria Watson- Doost can trace her Affrilachian roots to Western North Carolina and Tennessee. Watson-Doost received a B.A. from the College of Emporia and an M.A. in Theatre Arts from Columbia University. After a career in the film industry, she and husband Rainer Doost arrived in Asheville, NC in 2005. Central to her work are elements of autobiography and self-portraiture. Even as her work is filled with angst, it operates toward resilience, reconciliation and redemption. These three artists will be contributing three pieces during the LaZoom Fringe Tour.
“Chimera” or “Gorilla Hands”
“Herma-Tango”
“Traveling Lassies”
Giles Collard and Lola York and Sky McDowell
As co-director of the Asheville Contemporary
Dance Theatre, Giles Collard performs and teaches in several dance idioms.
Lola York is a filmmaker and a member of the ACDT and has created videos and dance theatre for past Fringe festivals and guides a blog/digital tea party named Ooh Lola!
Sky McDowell has recently appeared as the Sausage King in The Nutcracker and the Mouse King at DWT.
Amy Hamilton
can usually be found in the company of plants, animals or kids. She is a dancer, writer, teacher, and gardener in Asheville, where she has been making original work with the Pipsissewa Movement Project since 2009.
Amy won a 2012 Best of Fringe Award and this is her
fourth year performing in the AFAF.
Square Dance
is a performance art piece choreographed by Amy Hamilton that creates a floor painting through improvisational movement.
ArtSpace Charter School is a K-8 tuition free public charter school located in Swannanoa, NC. The school's vision is to be, "A national benchmark in educational excellence through integration of the arts." As such, students in grades K-6 receive weekly instruction in visual art, dance, theatre arts, and music, while students in 7th/8th grades choose from these disciplines as "electives." The performers at this year's festival are from the 7th and 8th grade Theatre Arts elective class and have been studying "Contemporary Themes in Art and Performance." Each student created their own original performances in response to their studies.
Their teacher, Joshua Batenhorst, is a graduate of Southwestern University's department of Theatre and Communication and has acted or directed in several local works for companies such as Asheville Community Theatre, NC Stage Company, and The Magnetic Theatre. Currently, in addition to teaching at ArtSpace, he works as a member of the local improv comedy troupe Reasonably Priced Babies.
Sarah Ruth Bonner
With a background in design, photography, sculpture and performance arts,
Sarah explores various realms of experimental art. She focuses on connecting photography, video, sound, sculptural forms and movement to create environmental work through installation and performance.
Fibers, an environmental experience that delves into the connections of movement, human form and texture. The work is a progression of a large organic structure that is manipulated to create movement against the backdrop of projections and ethereal sound.
Hank and Barbara Eder
Hank Eder is a writer, PR professional, and now a filmmaker. A former news reporter and middle school educator, he came to Western NC to pursue more grandiose dreams. He has been married for 32 years to Barbara Eder, a composer and musician. Her work is sometimes described as “expansive orchestral electronic.” Hank and Barbara have several creative projects currently in the “hatching” stage.
The Smallest Sleuth
is Hank and Barbara’s debut film. Hank wrote and directed, and Barbara composed and performed the music. This film is a labor of love, made possible by the generous contributions of time, energy, and talent by its cast and crew. “The Smallest Sleuth” features young actors from Asheville and Madison County and a 16-year-old Director of Photography. The film was created for the Prestige Short Film Competition in the 2012 Asheville Cinema Festival.
Grayson Morris
has been a puppeteer since 2007. She is the artistic director of the Nut House Theater which produces mainly short form puppetry for adults. Morris is also the founder of the Asheville Puppet Club, a community involvement group which meets monthly and seeks to empower beginning puppeteers. Check us out on Facebook.
The Trutle and the Scorpion
The Nut House Theater’s rendition of the folktale of the turtle and the scorpion written by Persian poet Nur ad-Din Abd ar- Rahman Jami.
Kristin Pedemonti
An Award winning Storyteller, Finalist in the TED Talks Worldwide Talent Search, and Free Hug aficionado, Kristin Pedemonti performs worldwide sharing her passion for connecting cultures and building bridges between people. In 2005, she sold her home & most possessions to create/facilitate volunteer project Literacy Outreach Belize donating programs for 33,340 students and training 800 teachers to use their own indigenous legends in schools.
Free Hugs @ 12,000 Feet
One woman’s journey from ‘Never meeting a Valentine’s Day she liked’ to traveling the world sharing Hugs & love: NYC to New Orleans, Paris, Madrid, Rome, Berlin, Bogota & beyond. Free Hug session after the show. You never know when there might be a FREE HUGS Emergency!
Anam Cara Theater Company
produces eclectic, avant garde theatre aimed at building community, sparking dialogue, and promoting progressive social change. Recent performances include the recurring Naked Girls Reading series, which seeks to challenge oppressive social norms regarding female nudity and women’s bodies, and several works of devised (ensemble-created) theatre.
Petroleum Sundaes for Everyone!
is a non-linear, ensemble-created performance exploring some of the unintended consequences of human technological, cultural, and biological evolution. Using movement, words and sounds, the ensemble creates an abstract representation of our world that is at once disturbing, hilarious, dystopian and hopeful. At its core, it is a thought-provoking, original work of theatre that looks at where we are, where we’ve been, and where we might be going as a species.
Heather Jones and Joanna Sycz
Heather Jones’s plays have appeared at American Theatre of Actors in New York, and at Green Light Theatrical Productions in Philadelphia, where her play, Last Rites, was one of six selections for the first presentation of GLO, their annual festival of one-acts by women. In 2009 Heather received a Regional Artists Project Grant from the Asheville Area Arts Council and the North Carolina Arts Council. In 2011, her short play, Chilling Drama and Special Effects was published in the Louisville Review. Her play My Unspeakable Confessions: Gala Dali Declines to Explain Herself has had repeated productions at The Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg FL, and her play, The Hoarder’s Child was presented at The 2012 Philly Fringe Festival. She is Co-founding Artistic Director of Blue Scarf Collective, a theatre-making group in St. Petersburg that has produced several of Heather’s plays, including The Waitress Play and Murder Ballad.
Joanna Sycz was introduced to acting at an early age. Her first acting role was to play Violet in Dusa, Stas, Vi and Fish by Pam Gems staged at the Park Theatre in Oslo, Norway. She has since moved to the USA and has performed in films, on TV and in theatres both here in Florida and in England. Among others she appeared as Helen in the award winning production of The Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh at StageWorks Theatre in Tampa, Lea in The Immigrant by Mark Harelik at the American Stage in St. Petersburg, Cecily in Many Mansions by Brooke McEldowney at the Fresh! Live! Theatre in St Petersburg and Spider in the world premiere of Totally Wired by Kevin Fegan at the Contact Theatre in Manchester UK. Most recently Joanna played Greed in The Bottom Of The Glass produced by the All Out Repertory Company in Ybor City, Mary in Hat Trick Theatre’s production of Mauritius by Theresa Rebeck .
The Hoarder’s Child
A one woman show about things we consume and stories we tell ourselves: a Child lives alone amid left behind stuff. Acting out an interruption to her routine, she reveals a violent past and the horrors inhabiting her space. Her yearning for contact takes us on a journey of humor, pathos, and hope.
Judy Calabrese
is an artist from New York City. This is her first solo performance piece. Immense gratitude for the loving support of Chris, Dev, Skyelar and Tallulah. Special thanks to The Altamont Theater for their generosity and their beautiful space.
Tomando Te is a solo performance piece about the power of sexual expression to transgress and transform biography and biology told through one woman's childhood and adult experiences. And one spicy grandmother.
John Crutchfield
(playwright, director) has presented work in the Asheville Fringe Festival since 2005. His plays Ivory, The Songs of Robert, Ruth, Twelve Treatises on Memory, The Labyrinth, Solstice, and Landscape With Missing Person have been produced regionally, as have various shorter pieces. He has also created and performed interdisciplinary work with X Factor Dance, Sans Pointe Dance, Legacy Butoh, Asheville Contemporary Dance Theatre, and Anemone Dance Theatre. At present, he is Associate Artistic Director of The Magnetic Theatre, and teaches part-time at Warren Wilson College. More info at: www.johncrutchfield.com.
Erik Moellering
(actor) teaches in the English Department at ABTech. Recent Asheville stage appearances include On the Verge and Two Rooms (both at NCStage), as well as John Crutchfield's Ruth, Lucia del Vecchio's The Family Tree, and Julian Vorus's Rock Saber (all at The Magnetic Theatre). He has also performs occasionally with local modern dance company Moving Women.
Laura Tratnik
(actor) is a native of Frankfurt, Germany. She studied acting in Berlin and worked professionally as a company member of the Berliner Ensemble and the Schaubühne. Since moving to Asheville in 2011, she has appeared onstage in Lucia del Vecchio's The Evolution of Woman (The Magnetic Theatre) and Connor McPherson's Shining City (Burning Coal Theatre Company).
Mary Zogzas
(sound designer) studied philosophy and music technology at UNCA. She works locally as a live sound engineer and recreates as performer/producer with Whitechips and +48v & Her Phantom Powers. As Resident Sound Designer for The Magnetic Theatre, she has worked on John Crutchfield's Solstice and Landscape With Missing Person, Steve Samuels's Love Among the Frankensteins, Lucia del Vecchio and Holiday Childress's MILF: The Musical, Julian Vorus's Red Black White, and most recently, The 30th Annual Bernstein Family Christmas Spectacular.
Come Thick Night
A production of My Favorite Leg Theatrical Company
Come Thick Night: A Shakespearean Gruselkabinett
Conceived and Directed by John Crutchfield
Performed by Erik Moellering and Laura Tratnik
Scored by Mary Zogzas
Keith Shubert of Toybox Theatre and
Madison J. Cripps of Cripps Puppets.
Combined Toybox and Cripps have a cumulative of over 20 years building and performing puppet theatre. Together they teach and perform around the country and have had feature presentations in The Orlando Puppet Festival, Puppetfest Midwest, The New Orleans Fringe Festival, LEAF, and soon to be a main-stage performance in the 2013 National Puppetry Festival. They are also founders, creators and hosts of The Wham Bam Puppet Slam in Asheville, NC.
SHITFARMER
is a collaboration between Keith Shubert of Toybox Theatre and Madison J. Cripps of Cripps Puppets. Shitfarmer is an absurdist tale of Gods and Monsters! Follow the trials and tribulations of a lowly custodian and his life of oppression and filth. UNTIL! He meets a mysterious trickster and his life takes a surprising turn down the road to liberation. Told through the use of various puppetry techniques and masked performance.
We hope this will give you some insight in all our amazing Fringe artists. Huzzah! We love them!!
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