BODY WEATHER LABORATORY

 FLOWER OF THE SEASON 2023 November

CALORIFLORA

Solo Performances: Mia Doi Todd, Melinda Ring,Carole Kim, and Cheryl Banks-Smith 

• Friday November, 17, 8:00 pm,

• Saturday November, 18, 8:00 pm

• Sunday November, 19, 3:00 pm

Electric Lodge, 1416 Electric Avenue, Venice, CA  90291. Free parking at Electric Lodge

Admission: free>>>RSVP

Artist’s Biographies 

Mia Doi Todd is a singer-songwriter and multi-media artist from Los Angeles.  Her latest album “Music Life” (City Zen Records, 2021) explores themes of motherhood and the creative life.  Pitchfork describes Mia as “a singer-songwriter who views her work more like a landscape painter, patiently bringing a world to life across the canvas.”  Mia received Yale University's Parker Huang Fellowship to live in Japan in 1998 and study Butoh dance with Kazuo Ohno and Min Tanaka.  It was on Tanaka's Body Weather Farm that Mia first met the dancers, Oguri and Roxanne Steinberg, with whom she later trained and danced at their Body Weather Laboratory in the early 2000's. Most known for her thoughtful and emotional songwriting, Mia has toured the US, Europe and Brazil, performing in such esteemed venues as the Hollywood Bowl and Rio de Janeiro's Circo Voador.

 Melinda Ring, choreographer, born in 1960 in Los Angeles, CA, has lived and worked in New York since 2001. She founded Special Projects in 2004 to support the production of her choreographic, performance and installation work. Ring is a 2016 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artist awardee, a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2019 NYFA Fellow, and a 2019 Movement Research Resident Artist supported by the Rosin Fund. Her recent works have also been commissioned and supported by The Kitchen, The Box Los Angeles, The Chocolate Factory, Yaddo, Headlands Center for the Arts, Whitman College, Annenberg Foundation (Metabolic Studio), Danspace Project, Movement Research, Bennington College, Performance Works NW, and Gibney Dance Center. Contact Quarterly devoted Chapbook 6 to Forgetful Snow (2014). Ring has developed programing as an artist-curator for Danspace Project (Platform 2011: Susan Rethorst: Retro(intro)spective, and Platform 2012: Judson Now program, Dance by Default). As a performer she has worked for artist Paul McCarthy on numerous projects, beginning in 1997 with Santa Chocolate Shop. In 2018 she participated in the MOMA exhibition, Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done, performing with Yanira Castro their iteration of Simone Forti’s Dance Construction See Saw. Ring received a B.A. in dance from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1982 and an M.F.A. from Bennington College in 2001. She was a critic in sculpture at Yale School of Art from 2014-2019. For Ring, “why to” and “how to" make dances has never been a settled matter. While she is intricately engaged in choreography, her work exists somewhere between sculpture and dance. Finished pieces retain traces from the process that manifest as raw immediacy within a dance and sometimes lead to the production of other types of discrete works in video, installation and performance. Through a desire to understand “who are these people?” and “what is their connection to each other?” a group of performers within Ring’s dances often appear as versions of one another — their connection established through an energetic/rhythmic psychic melding, rather than through more traditional means. www.melindaring.com

 Carole Kim is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus on multi-media installations, video projection, live and telematic performance, drawing and photography. Her work spans diverse contexts including experimental art, music, dance, theater and site-specific installation. With a hands-on, tactile approach to the physical materials she works with, Kim consistently pushes how analog meets digital media to create new intersections of discipline and form. Out of a love of experimentation, process and collaborative co-creation has sprung a consistent body of work activating the edges of where analog meets digital, physical meets virtual and visual meets sound meet the body.  

Kim’s work has been supported by Thoughtworks Arts, Irvine Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Center for Cultural Innovation, MAP Fund, Headlands Center for the Arts, Montalvo Arts Center, NowArt LA, Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA)/Stanford University, Metabolic Studio, City of LA (COLA), Pasadena Arts Council, The Music Center, Durfee Foundation, REDCAT, University of California Institute for Research in the Arts, The Getty Center, AutomataLA, SASSAS, Dublab, Newtown, Turbulence.org, Zeitgeist Ensemble, Circuit Network-SF, CalArts and Descanso Gardens.

Cheryl Banks-Smith has a long career in the dance arts as a performer, choreographer, dance educator, improviser and interdisciplinary arts “explorer”. She is a former dancer and vocalist with renowned jazz innovator, Sun Ra and His Myth Science Arkestra, appearing with the Arkestra in feature films and in sound recordings.  In New York she danced for many years with Dianne McIntyre’s modern dance company, Sounds in Motion. She has also performed with Sarah Swenson’s Vox Dance Theatre.  

Cheryl has worked as an independent artist and teacher and has toured throughout Europe, Canada, Mexico, Japan, and Africa. During her time residing in Europe, she collaborated with German bassist, Peter Kowald, developing an intimate dance and music improvisational theatrical form, in duo and quartet.  She toured with Kowald in Japan in 1989, where she met and saw perform Butoh dance pioneer, Kazuo Ohno. 

 Among her many collaborative projects she has created and performed with poets Ntozaki Shange, Thulani Davis, visual artists Senga Nengudi, Ulrike Arnold, filmmakers Ulysses Jenkins, Barbara McCullough, and some of the finest contemporary musician/composers of the jazz and new music genres.  Among them are Cecil Taylor, Joseph Jarmon, Douglas Ewart, Henry Grimes, James Newton, Jeanne Lee, Joelle Leandra, Joan La Barbara, Vinny Golia, Lawrence “Butch” Morris and others.  Cheryl earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Choreography from the Ohio State University and is a Professor of Dance at Pasadena City College. 

This performances are made possible by City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, California Arts Council, Oregon Community Foundation, the Electric Lodge and our donors.

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