Local Heroes/The Big Picture Dance Festival June 26, 2008

"Local Heroes/The Big Picture" presents trail-blazing new works by the heroes of the next generation of international dance innovators Karen Sherman from Minneapolis and Kate Watson-Wallace from Philadelphia.

Bessie Award-winner Karen Sherman's Tiny Town is inspired by Midwestern landscapes and climate (both external and internal) the region's complicated social and political histories and the role the horizon plays on personal destiny. Minneapolis-based, native New Yorker Sherman explores disappearing into the land-geographical, emotional, anatomical and cultural-and reappearing. Originally commissioned by the Walker Art Center and the Southern Theater in Minneapolis, Tiny Town makes physical the silent spirit of personal environment, from the weather to Wal-Marts, and the ways it shapes human identity.

Choreographer/director Kate Watson-Wallace, a site-based artist who lives in Philadelphia, is crafting one of her site-specific dance and video installations for the unique environs and history of Project Artaud Theater, which was formerly a can company before its current decades-long life as a performance space. House is a guided tour of the psychic world of home, a trip through the looking glass to an utterly ordinary place. House is a performance installation that takes the audience throughout the rooms of a home installed within Project Artaud Theater's alternative spaces. A physical meditation on absence experienced through intimate, subtle dances and video installations in tiny rooms where audiences sit just inches from the dancers. These simple, familiar rooms hold magical events, making the world of a row house fabulous and strange. Each room aches with memory as the traces of past inhabitants dance rituals of communion, isolation, and absurdity.

$18-$25.

Official Website: http://www.odctheater.org