DNA PRESENTS: SPLICE: A dinosaur attacks a lighthouse | Mac Low & Toback January 27, 2011

Dance New Amsterdam (DNA) presents award-winning choreographers Clarinda Mac Low and Jordana Che Toback in the stirring Winter 2011 Season opener, SPLICE: A dinosaur attacks a lighthouse. Curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones and Dan Safer, the January 27-30 performances blend dance, satire, elaborate costuming and full-out insanity. A post-performance talkback moderated by Dan Safer, Artistic Director of Witness Relocation, will take place on Thursday, January 27 in DNA’s 130-seat theater.

Performances take place Thursday - Saturday at 8:00pm and Sunday at 3:00pm. Prices range from $12 - $17. DNA is located near all major trains to Chambers Street/City Hall.

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Clarinda Mac Low
Double Public Blunder: Monster-us
World Premiere
Choreography by Clarinda Mac Low
Sound Score by Michael DiPietro and Clarinda Mac Low
Costumes by DiPietro, with conceptual contributions from Mac Low

Double Public Blunder: Monster-us is a revival of Mac Low’s Public Blunder series. Public blunders are darkly comic rituals, entertaining and disturbing feats of performance where the most embarrassing situations are uncovered through a smoky lens of continually interrupted and ridiculous seduction. Everything’s hanging by a thread here, but all mistakes are intentional—or are they? The Blunders before were solos, but this time it’s a duet, and we’re scary.

BAXTEN award-winning choreographer Clarinda Mac Low’s solo performance work and collaborative group extravaganzas have appeared extensively in New York City and around the world particularly at P.S. 122, St. Mark’s Church, Movement Research at Judson Church, and The Kitchen. She is the 2010 grant recipient of the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art and has also received support from Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Greenwall Foundation, Joyce Metz-Gilmore Foundation, NYSCA and LMCC. She has participated in many different residencies, including as a MacDowell Fellow (2000), a DTW ARM Fellow (2004-2005) and with the Society for Cultural Exchange in Pittsburgh. Mac Low is co-Director of Culture Push, a cross-disciplinary organization encouraging hands-on participation and strong hybrid ideas, in partnership with Aki Sasamoto and Arturo Vidich.

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Jordana Che Toback / POON Productions
Crush The Pearl Part 1
Choreography by Jordana Che Toback
Performed by Courtney Baron, Dorian Cervantes, Airin Dalton, Courtney Jo Drasner, Christina Johnson, Gabriel Malo, Tsubasa Ogawa, Julie Smith
Music by Radiohead
Costumes by Jordana Che Toback with Elisa Jimenez

Crush the Pearl Part 1 is a re-working of the 10 dances Toback made from 1998-2001 for art-rock band Fischerspooner. Lovelorn and full of venom when first generating this movement vocabulary, everything old is new again as each old dance reemerges as a monster of a different sort with Radiohead and Thom Yorke providing the musical accompaniment and glamorous catharsis as our muse.

Jordana Che Toback, director of POON Production Ensemble, grew up under the tutelage of Bella Lewitzky and toured internationally with Mark Morris Dance Group for seven years. Toback has also performed with such notable choreographers as Amy Pivar, Patricia Hoffbauer/George Emilio Sanchez, Pam Tanowitz, Meg Wolfe, Laura Staton, and Douglas Dunn/Joshua Fried. The original dancer/director/choreographer for rock band Fischerspooner, she created the signature cabaret disco dance style that catapulted the band from NYC’s art scene to Capitol Records. Her choreography has been featured in Bessie and Obie award-winning evening-length dance theatre pieces and operettas which have toured at length including The FringeNYC, LA’s 2100 SQ FT, PS122, HERE, Movement Research, Cynthia Hopkins at St. Ann's Warehouse, and Harvard’s A.R.T.

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Collaborative Duet
A dinosaur attacks a lighthouse (Scylla and Charybdis)
World Premiere
Choreographed and Performed by Clarinda Mac Low and Jordana Che Toback

Monsters in the night frighten children; the monsters within terrify us from inside out. Che Toback and Mac Low set out to charm, tame, expose and destroy each other’s monsters in a duet where the internal beast comes out to play with the inner child.

Official Website: http://www.dnadance.org/site/performances/dna-presents-winter-season-2011/splice-clarinda-mac-low-and-jordana-che-toback/