Babaamaajimowinan (Telling of news in different places)

THE ORDWAY PRESENTS NEW WORK BY NATIVE CHOREOGRAPHER ROSY SIMAS

Saturday, January 12 at 7:30pm

"[G]enerous and personal work on many levels - it's as if Simas has flung open the door to her subconscious and invited the audience inside to have a look around." – Star Tribune

"It takes a special kind of performer to bewitch an audience with stillness. Rosy Simas has that gift. An articulate dancer, Simas has the ability to suffuse the smallest movements, or even complete motionlessness, with a captivating aura." – City Pages

(SAINT PAUL, Minn .; November 27, 2018) – Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, in collaboration with The O'Shaughnessy, is honored to present Weave, a new dance project choreographed by Rosy Simas, an award-winning Haudenosaunee (Seneca) artist. The full-length dance performance, on stage at 7:30pm on January 12, pays tribute to the interwoven and interdependent nature of our world. Tickets start at $22 and can be purchased online at http://www.ordway.org, by phone at 651-224-4222 or in person at the Ordway ticket office.

In Weave, individual and embodied stories are the vibrant threads that mesh in a performance woven of story, dance, moving image and quadraphonic sound. For many Native peoples, weaving is a way of life, an individual and communal act in which cultural stories and tribal knowledge are conveyed. Stories within cultural materials seem invisible, intangible, until they are made and shared. Weave crafts these stories though Simas' embodied lens as a Native feminist movement and image-maker.

There is no real "premiere" of Weave, as the work develops cyclically through research, rehearsal and performance, with community participation in multiple cities informing the process, via workshops, open rehearsals, interviews and discussions. This continual feedback loop disrupts conventional performance expectations, by creating work that is always evolving, with local audience interactions reshaping the work with each performance. The multi-layered dance project was created in residencies at The Cowles Center for Dance & the Performing Arts (Minneapolis), McKnight Fellowships Residency at MANCC (Tallahassee), The O'Shaughnessy at St. Catherine University (St. Paul) and the Ordway (St. Paul).

Ojibwe writer Marcie Rendon (White Earth Nation) attended one of the residency workshops and contributed her thoughts on the Weave blog, which features Native writers responding to Weave. She said, "Brown, red, black bodies moved with fluidity, filling the space reminiscent of the sand and liquid shifting in sandscape sculptures. There was music and the sound of feet on hardwood floor with a backdrop of visual images that filled the walls. Sitting in the studio I felt immersed in the production as the dimensionality of the whole enveloped all the senses."

Weave was developed to be site-specific at the Ordway. And "site-specific" for Simas is more than a location - it is the community that occupies the space, the territory, and the Native history of the place. Additional site-specific iterations of Weave will be created for The Alabama Dance Council (Birmingham), Dance Place (Washington, D.C.), Maui Arts & Cultural Center (Hawai'i) and Intercultural Journeys (Philadelphia).

Simas created Weave in collaboration with international artists: composer François Richomme; performers Zoë Klein, Sam Mitchell, Valerie Oliveiro and George Stamos; writers Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán and Heid E. Erdrich; lighting designer Carolyn Wong and production assistant Eric Larson.

Ordway Center for the Performing Arts received an NEA Art Works grant for Simas to develop and present the project. The Art Works category is the NEA's largest funding category and supports projects that focus on the creation of art that meets the highest standards of excellence, public engagement with diverse and excellent art, lifelong learning in the arts, and/or the strengthening of communities through the arts.

Co-commissioned by Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, The Alabama Dance Council, Dance Place and Maui Arts & Cultural Center, Weave is made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts' National Dance Project and The MAP Fund, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and additional funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The world premiere of Weave is funded in part by The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, as part of its Knight Arts Challenge, a community-wide contest funding ideas that engage and enrich Saint Paul through the arts. Major support for Weave is from the Joyce Awards, a program of The Joyce Foundation.

Weave is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

QUICK REFERENCE

Performance:

Rosy Simas Danse

WEAVE

Date:

7:30 p.m., Saturday, January 12, 2019

Pre- and Post-Show Events:

ORDWAY EXTRA

6:30 p.m., Target Atrium

Rosy Simas Danse Talkback and Mingle

Post-show, Target Atrium

Theater Venue & Location:

Music Theater

Ordway Center for the Performing Arts 345 Washington Street

Saint Paul, Minnesota 55102

Accessibility:

American Sign Language interpretation and audio description are scheduled for this performance. For more information about accommodations, visit https://ordway.org/accessibility-services/.

 

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