Friday, October 18th, 7:00 pm at Stone Valley Arts
Saturday, October 19th, 7:00 pm at West Rutland Town Hall
Concept, Choreography, Direction : Erika Schmidt for Vital Spark Performance Group
Performing ensemble /collaborating artists: Melisa Clark, Lina Cloffe-Hanson, Val Geisey, Lea Reill, Alex Welych-Miller, Molly Winslow-Hanson, Ulyiana Schkel
Audio/Visual Design: Toby Kaufmann-Buhler
Original music/soundscape : Toby Kaufmann-Buhler, Nick Turner, Gary Schmidt
SEED, CLOUD, HYACINTH, BIRD is an evocative and moving live art media dance performance that observes human behavior within the individual and the group through which a circular narrative is developed by the ensemble and where patterns and unpredictable shifts occur. The project has been created through a rigorous collaborative process between extraordinary artists that have come together from diverse performing art media backgrounds. The collaboration is significant to expressing both personal and collective experience to life in the here and now. The performance reflects to ways the technosphere has begun to penetrate our ecosphere and questions the effects of virtual reality on our experience of and relationship to each other and the natural world. Throughout the performance, video and sound create perceptible alterations in feeling, rhythm and mode. Through layered intensification and then gradual diminishment of media stimuli there is a return to a particular clarity seen through the dance….dance as illumination to what movement is, and to what it can be…dance that is integral to the workings of our mind and sprit and consciousness.
Erika Schmidt is a visual and performing artist. Schmidt received her MFA in Art and Performance from the University of South Florida in Tampa, FL. where she founded Vital Spark Performance Group, a collaborative interdisciplinary ensemble that has traveled to major U.S. cities and throughout Europe. Schmidt has been a guest artist at the Honghua School in Guangham, China , Anderson House: Harvard Club in Wash. D.C., San Francisco Conservatory of Music, University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, Elon University, Elon, N.C. and a commissioned artist for the Southern Graphics Council Conference, GraphicStudio, at University of South Florida, Tampa, FL. Among the numerous awards she has received acknowledging her unique approach to live art theater are accolades at international dance festivals in Prague,Czech Republic (1999); Cecena, Italy (2001); and Barcelona, Spain (2006).
West Rutland Town Hall
35 Marble Street
West Rutland , VT
United States