This coming June, the 19th Annual Performance Studies International Conference will present a week of panels, roundtables, praxis sessions, performances, and plenary dialogues featuring scholars and artists in Stanford, CA. PSi is a professional association founded in 1997 to promote communication and exchange among artists, thinkers, activists and academics working in the field of performance. The 2013 conference theme, “Now Then: Performance and Temporality” will be opened with a performance by award-winning dancer Ann Carlson. Columbia’s InterArts department will be represented by current students and alumni of the program through the performance of new work of Media MFA Alexa Rittichier.
Alexa’s work has been a conduit for her explorations of interactions between visual and performing art, and her artwork explores themes of life and death, loss and gain, creation and destruction. The piece she will present at PSi, Collecting Ourselves: Bone Stacking, springs from her interdisciplinary method for developing work from visceral impulses using the body as a place for the germination of ideas. The project began in November of 2012, and includes the participation of Rittichier’s colleagues in the collective People on a Stage: Lydia Feuerhelm, Jenny Garnett, Emily Rose, Courtney St. Clair, Michael St. John, and Don Widmer.
“This project is presents a challenge to our cultural obsession with individualism,” says Alexa. “Working with these six generous and talented individuals in this collective cooperative lifestyle has built harmony, and addresses creativity as a group process. The active embodied practice of the group offers hope for sustained progress.”
People on a Stage will be preparing for PSi in California with a series of preview performances, open dress rehearsals, as well as the InterArts Department MFA Thesis Performances, all of which are free and open to the public. To underwrite the ensemble’s rehearsal, production, and transportation costs, Rittichier has set up an Indiegogo fundraising campaign.
To learn more about People on a Stage, and see video about the project, click on the links.
A complete list of performance dates follows below:
Work-in-progress Showing:
March 8, 2013 at 8:00 p.m. & 9:00 p.m.,
Solid Ground Studio, 718 W 18th Street, Chicago IL
Open Dress Rehearsal:
April 26, 2013, 2:00 p.m., Stage 2, Columbia College Chicago, 618 S Michigan Ave, Chicago IL
InterArts MFA Thesis Show Opening:
April 26, 2013 from 5:00–7:00 p.m. the Center for Book and Paper Arts Gallery
1104 S Wabash Avenue, Chicago IL.
April 26, 2013, Performance at 7:30 p.m., Stage 2
April 27, 2013, Performance at 2:00 p.m., Stage 2
