FLOWER OF THE SEASON 2023
CALORIFLORA
(A coined word praising flowers that can withstand high temperatures.)
Four Solos
Friday November 17, 8:00 pm
Saturday November 18, 8:00 pm
Sunday November 19, 3:00 pm
Carole Kim, inflorescence: fig. 1
For this piece, visual artist Carole Kim with musician Alicia Byer (clarinetist plus vocals) takes as inspiration the life cycle of the inverted flower: the fig and its co-conspirator, the fig wasp. Visually and conceptually mining the idea of inverted flowering, flowering within, for new notions of fortitude Kim is interested in exploring this relationship of mutualism that has been so uniquely orchestrated over time. Of course, it is and it isn't about a fig.
Biography:
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 meets 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.
Alicia Byer is a clarinetist/composer-improviser based in the LA area. Originally from Claremont, CA, she holds a bachelors in music composition with emphasis in electronic media from Mills College. She has studied with Fred Frith, Pauline Oliveros, Cecil Taylor, Meredith Monk, Joelle Leandre and others. Inspirations include nature, culture, and everything in-between."
Cheryl Banks-Smith , Petals Push Out on Painted Skies
Petals are the essence of the manifestation of flowers. Anthropologists have noted that flowers were a major contributor to the development of civilization. Through the process of pollination new plant forms have evolved creating agriculture, commerce and cultivating the creative and intellectual growth of humanity. In essence, flowers are a metaphor for civilization, evolution and the beauty of Nature.
Through an improvisational structure, and in exchange with percussion and soundscape artist, Breeze Smith, we will explore collaboratively, inspirations derived from this six-word title.
Petals, Push Out on Painted Skies
Petals,
Skin like a wet peach
Fragrance wafts over the atmosphere
Anticipation throbs in the air
Boo-boom, Boo-boom,
Heartbeats rising and falling through the shaft
of Painted Sky.
Threshing, threshing and threshing…
Through rocks, mountains and
Through Earth’s layers
To push, push out your face,
Your heart, your Self.
The sky’s perfume and mist
Anoints the inner most clouds,
Wind-ing through as chimes of light and shadow reverberate.
Petals, burnt now
From countless efforts,
Remain with their essence
And blanket the land,
Dry and sweet.
Cheryl Banks-Smith
Costume Design: Alicia Moseley
Live Music: Breeze Smith
Biography:
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.
Breeze Smith, drums/percussion/sound imagery, has performed and improvised in various ensembles and in solo projects. He is also a visual artist with commissioned works of sculpture, paintings and drawings. He performs with L.A. legend, Dwight Trible, and his Cosmic Vibrations, and has recorded with the collective.
15 minutes intermission
Melinda Ring,The End (monotropa uniflora)
Musical Intervention: Zenji Oguri
Biography:
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. She began her career as a member of the Rudy Perez Performance Ensemble (1981-1984). Studies in the late 80's with Min Tanaka in Japan catalyzed her choreographic process. www.melindaring.com
Thank you to:
Howard Silver, heart and home
Lenny Steinberg, heart and home away from home
Jim Morrison & The Doors, inspiration and loan
Anonymous, rehearsal space grant
John Bellucci and Nancy Sandercock, L.A. pit crew
Liz, beautiful friend
Mia Doi Todd, Plumeria at Sugar Cove
Plumeria, with its five simple petals, soft as baby's skin, radiating out of bare prehistoric branches, originated in Mexico and Central America. Treasured for its delicate, otherworldly scent, plumeria has traveled far and wide and is significant in many cultures. In India, it is known as champa. In Hawaiian, it is melia. Plumeria's fragrant blossoms immediately evoke the precious and fleeting beauty of life, like nature's poetry.
What would you take from the Old World to start anew?
Corn, beans, rice, squash, taro? A shovel, a broom.
Is there room for something of beauty?
A flute, a guitar, a violin?
an olive branch, a stick of plumeria, pepper, cinnamon
Music:
"Cais" by Mia Doi Todd and Fabiano do Nascimento
"Plumeria" by Mia Doi Todd
"Hawaii Janaina" by Luis Pérez Ixoneztli and Jesse Peterson
Costume Design: Mia Doi Todd
Special thanks to Niki Tsukamoto for sharing her expertise in indigo dyeing.
Biography:
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.
Lighting designer:
Keiden Oguri
Sound:
Zenji Oguri graduated from Bennington College in 2015 where he studied architecture and its intersections with anthropology and music. His main interest has been architecture as experience and its non-visual qualities. His fascination with recorded audio stems from its ability to create aural soundscapes unrestricted by our physical world and its effect on our perception of space. The relationship between sound, space and movement is an integral part of his artistic consciousness and he continues to explore the ways they each develop and influence each other. He is a junior architect at Rees Studio in Santa Monica. He is a participant of BWL Workshop.
Artistic Directors
Roxanne Steinberg dances to transcend familiar vocabularies and bring about a heightened sense of perception, connectivity and flow of primordial associations. A graduate of Bennington College, she has taught Body Weather Laboratory since 1988. She performs worldwide as a soloist and with her partner Oguri, sister Morleigh Steinberg, and composers Yas-Kaz, Paul Chavez, Kenta Nagai, Tatsuya Nakatani, Leon Mobley, Myra Melford, Alex Cline, Pheeroan Aklaff, Motoko Honda, Will Salmon. She has worked with dancers Min Tanaka and Amagatsu of Sankai Juku, and artists Hirokazu Kosaka, Carole Kim and Bill Viola. Roxanne has taught at UCLA, Cal Arts, Cal State Los Angeles, Sci Arc, Pomona College, and Harvard Westlake, among others. She is artist-in-residence at the Electric Lodge in Venice. She is a 2020 DCA COLA Fellow.
Oguri’s inspiration to dance came after meeting Butoh founder Hijikata Tatsumi. He started training/performing in 1985 with famed dancer Min Tanaka's company, Mai-Juku and participated in founding Body Weather Farm. Oguri also began performing solo dance in the avant-garde scene in Tokyo. He also designed the lighting for Min Tanaka’s choreographies. He practiced traditional organic farming, experiencing the rhythms and cycles of this most human lifestyle. This connection of the human body to nature is a foundation of Oguri’s dance. 1991- Oguri moved to Los Angeles and formed Body Weather Laboratory LA with Roxanne Steinberg. For over 30 years, Oguri has been teaching, creating and producing dance and multi-media works incorporating his own large-scale set/sculpture installations and his dramatic, often chiaroscuro lighting in formal theater settings and site-specific venues worldwide. He continues to investigate the relationship of dance to environment and the boundaries between performer and audience. He has developed collaborative projects with musicians, sculptors, painters, and poets, using literature, daily life imagery and simple materials to transform space and time with dance. He actively brings dance to the wider community. Since 1998, Oguri produces “Flower of the Season”, a series of workshops and performances, giving national and international emerging and master dance artists opportunities to develop and present work. In 2011, Oguri formed ARCANE Collective with Morleigh Steinberg, touring full productions and live concepts.
Oguri has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, The Annenberg Foundation, the New England Foundation for the Arts, National Dance Project, the Rockefeller Foundation, The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, The Getty Center, the James Irvine Foundation/Dance USA, Japan Foundation, United State Artist Doris Duke Fellow 2018, among others.
Photography: Denise Leitner
Video documentation: Theo Rasmussen
Box office: Johanna Wolf Petersen and Ynez Janaina Peterson
House manager: Johanna Wolf Petersen
Special thanks: Paul Chavez, Lori and Joel Shapiro, Johanna Wolf Petersen, Eleni Merari and Linda Lucks
These performances are made possible by City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, California Arts Council, Venice Community Housing, the Electric Lodge and our donors.
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Audience Survey
About the Flower of the Season
Since 1999, the series continues to evolve as a platform for the development of new and important dance explorations by a variety of local and international artists. Yearly these dancers are chosen to train together at Body Weather Laboratory, developing individual interpretations of a common vision. Flower of the Season has indeed become a pilgrimage - drawing dancers, choreographers and musicians to a seasonal offering of blossoming creativity.
Dance and performance are transitory arts. They exist in the present. Just as the splendor of a flower is fleeting, so is each remarkable moment of a dance performance - always passing into the next. A flower seeks the light, growing and developing accordingly. It finds just the right time and place to blossom.
The History of Flower of the Season.
Flower of the Season is the extension of the Earthbeat series Oguri and Steinberg began 1999 to foster collaborations between visual artists, musicians, writers and dancers. Together, with the work of percussionist Adam Rudolph, sculptor Stephan Glassman, artist Hirokazu Kosaka, musicians Paul Chavez, Wadada Leo Smith, G.E. Stinson, Nels Cline, Mark Dresser and Tigran Hamasyan. dancers Roxanne Steinberg, Melinda Ring, Morleigh Steinberg, Mia Doi Todd, Jamie Burris, Sherwood Chen, Boaz Barkan, Claudia Lopez, Lillian Barbeito, Benjamin Jarrett, Eric Losoya, Jesske Hume, Magali Gajan, Heyward Bracey, Asher Woodworth, Ariadna Rodriguez Cima, Joyce Lu, A.Dola Baroni, Meyu Kobayashi, Rosemary Candelario, Heather Ehlers, Kim Nakakura, Linda Luke, Annelien Goetschalckx, Cat Westwood, Christine Quoiraud, Yasunari Tamai, Andres Corchero, Frank van de Ven, Simone Forti, Michelle Shiu-lin Lai, Carmina Escobar, Chenhui Mao, Jay Carlon, Dani Lunn, Hyoin Jun, DaEun Jung, Destefano DeLuise, and Oguri has continually explored boundaries between audience and stage, creating fresh contexts for the presentation of art and performance.