Team work makes perfected flying super powers for Mmm, a momma of many other subpar talents such as super napping and mastering terrible jokes. The ensemble finesse this flight sequence with original member Mindy Myer for Trip the Light Fantastic: The Making of SuperStrip (2016). Check out our last Flashback Friday post for more details on this classic Lucky Plush favorite.
Flashback Friday: Trip the Light Fantastic: The Making of SuperStrip
Trip the Light Fantastic: The Making of SuperStrip follows a group of washed up superheroes attempting to reinvent themselves by starting a nonprofit think tank for do-gooders. Complex training missions and specialized movement techniques bring structure to their collective, but the unlikely supers are unable to find a shared mission and brand. In the struggle to achieve consensus, they discover that real-world problems are far more complex than singular forces of evil, and that having power is part of the problem.
We-Support Wednesday: Erin Kilmurray
Erin Kilmurray is a powerhouse dance artist making genre-straddling performance projects that challenge traditional relationships between performer and spectator through electric, often political work that enlivens body and environment. Resonating in a space where social gatherings, dance, and parties collide, she works from contemporary dance, theater, space-making, team building, nightlife culture + social practice.
Awarded a 2020 Lab Artist by Chicago Dancemakers Forum, Kilmurray speaks on landmark works (The Fly Honey Show, SEARCH PARTY, Knockout.) alongside influences, curiosities, and future-making with her project-in-process, the Function.
Created and performed by a group of women and queer artists, SEARCH PARTY is a live dance work that relentlessly challenges and reconstructs the boundaries we face by investigating freedom in space and in the body, and what is expected of us vs. what we are capable of. Existing somewhere between a dancefloor and a sports arena, this work is wrought from defeat, endurance, compassion, competition, collaboration, and victory - as individuals, as a group, and with our audience directly as complicit spectators.
Kilmurray is in-process with the Function - an episodical project built on envisioning feminist utopias through dance. By vigorously cross-training with design, DJ, and production building, Kilmurray and dancers will share visions for the future and tag-team creative skill sets in their process --- exploring agency, authorship, grief, and joy through the creation and operation of dance spaces.
You can donate through her websites: www.erinkilmurray.com / www.theflyhoneyshow.com or directly to her venmo: @Erin-Kilmurray
Making-It Monday: Rooming House
This duet was ultimately incorporated into Rooming House. Ensemble members Kara Brody and Michel Rodriguez Cintra move in relation to one another, tangling and untangling their bodies as they move about the space.
Flashback Friday: The Queue
Equal parts dance and theater, The Queue is set in a fictional international airport, where travelers stumble humorously, tragically, and awkwardly into each other’s private lives. The Queue’s influences are early 20th century forms of slapstick, vaudeville acts, Busby Berkeley style choreography, creaky 1-act plays, and a 1746 farcical play about a family inheritance. The end of this excerpt features a moment from the show in which pre-selected audience members participated in a flashmob-style choir to join the cast in singing portions of Pat Benatar’s “We Belong.” This unexpected moment sometimes resulted in other audience members joining in the singing to participate in the show as well.
Featuring ensemble members: Michel Rodriguez Cintra, Daniel Gibson, Elizabeth Luse, Marc Macaranas, Cassandra Porter, Benjamin Wardell, and Meghann Wilkinson.
We-Support Wednesday: Honey Pot Performance
If/Then: New Works Festival is presented by Honey Pot Performance at the Green Line Performing Arts Center interweaving the original commissioned works of featured artists Allegra Dolores, Sojourner Zenobia, Norman W. Long, Gloria "Gloe" Talamantes, and Honey Pot Performance in a culminating performance event of divine alchemy. Works are inspired by a year long process of creative ritual. The ensemble played improvisational scores together built on themes from Cuban artist Belkis Ayon's work, practices of spiritual guidance and intuition, and notions of ritual and ancestral connection.
This is a snippet of their May 13, 2020 live-streaming performance of If/Then Phase 1. During this 2nd Movement, the artists play out the score we divined together which called for us to imagine the following prompts:
In writing-song, haiku, diamante, original poetic form, transcribing text onto image
If two or more gather in the name of, that's church...
Recreate a proverb, myth, or narrative
You can donate to Honey Pot Performance directly through their CashApp: $HoneyPotPerformance
Making-It Monday: Work in Process
This complex game of catch came about in the early phases of developing new work. Although this specific experiment ultimately led to something else, the exploration was a crucial part of the process.
Flashback Friday: Cinderbox 2.0
Check out this all-star cast from Cinderbox 2.0 (2013) who brought a whole new dimension to Lucky Plush’s iconic Cinderbox 18 (2007). As with the original work, Cinderbox 2.0 takes its cue from “reality" culture to explore the comedy and anxiety in our hyper-networked world, while blurring the lines between live and virtual, private and public, observer and observed, improvised and scripted.
Featuring ensemble members Francisco Aviña, Marc Macaranas, Melinda Jean Myers, Cassandra Porter, Benjamin Wardell, and Meghann Wilkinson.