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Company SoGoNo
www.sogono.org
Company SoGoNo employs an innovative
vocabulary that draws from Japanese Butoh dance, Ruth Zaporah’s Action
Theater, and contemporary dance-theater. Movement and sound ranges from
wild and boldly expressive to quiet and intricate. Characters are often
archetypal, referencing fairytales and dream symbolism. The mood of the
work is surreal, flat-out funny, and fable-like.
"Wickedly enjoyable" – Claudia
La Rocco, New York Times
"Exhilarating dance-theater" – Angela Ashman, Village Voice
"Brilliance...seductive... mesmerizing...impressive collaboration.”
– Lynn Berg, nytheater.com
“Vivid physical theater” – The New
Yorker
Touring Programs
Company SoGoNo offers 2 evening
length pieces, each which can be broken into shorter performances for
festival or lec/dem formats.
PROGRAM A:
No Country for Old Women
Tours with 3 actor/dancers, 1
musician, 1 lighting designer – 5 artists
total
In a vibrant dialogue between live musical invention and highly
physical theater, No Country for Old Women is a visually surreal
travelogue of the ordinary - made extraordinary by acute attention to
sensory detail. In movement, language, and sound, the piece tells
brutal and whimsical tales that lurch towards beauty amidst absurdity
and humor. A shoot-out in a cowboy saloon is enacted by Edo-era
Geishas with flute accompaniment, a heart being operated upon speaks
about its memories of being inside a bird, a sailor searches for a
vanished ship as a Spanish tango is danced by fate and nature.
No Country for Old Women
expands the realm of what one usually anticipates from structured
improvisation to include an elegant cohesion and collective
sophistication in composition that rivals the most thoughtfully
assembled set work. It is often with great labor that post-performance
audiences are convinced that the works are devised in the moment, such
is the organic nature of the how the action unfolds, combined with
clear articulation and passionate immediacy.
Performed by Action Theater Senior Teachers Cassie Terman and Heather
Harpham, SoGoNo Artistic Director Tanya Calamoneri, and acclaimed
experimental musician Danny Tunick.
Outreach includes Action Theater workshop and Japanese Butoh workshop
PROGRAM B:
Bird Suite
Tours with 8 dancers, 1 rigger/tech
Includes: Hatch, Hatchlings, This Ain’t No Swan Lake, Fighter Jet
Waltz, Flamingo Flamingo
“Birds fascinate me. They are part creepy machine and part fluffy
petable-ness. It’s uncanny when one looks you in the eye.” – Director,
Tanya Calamoneri on Bird Suite
Bird Suite
is an evening-length dance theater work that explores birds and
bird-like personalities, ranging from 4 baby birds who just won’t quit
trying to fly, to scheming swans surveying the room for
competition. The pieces work as stand alone gems, strung together
they make a glittering necklace of beautiful images and alert,
articulate movement.
Hatch (9 min) features 4
baby blue birds who try, try, try to fly, crash, and keep on flapping
their way to one exhilarating soar.
Hatchlings (11 min)
features 3 caterpillars suspended from the ceiling in black cocoons,
who emerge one disjointed limb at a time until they hang completely
exposed with their sac transformed into butterfly/bat wings.
This Ain’t No Swan Lake features
(20 min) 5 gorgeous gals who preen and posture atop their bar stools
and skate across the dance floor. They are by turns thick as
thieves and backstabbing competitors who vie for a place as leader of
the pack. A scheming waiter plies them with full goblets of wine,
which they twirl and hurl at one another. And a surly barkeep
messes with the music, slipping in warbled bits of Tchaikovsky’s ballet
that she turns into her own Waits/Chaplin-esque tune. The “swans”
end their romp wet, disheveled, slightly disgruntled, but having a good
time nonetheless. The piece is inspired by DV8’s Enter Achilles,
featuring a company of men who engage in high flying choreography while
holding full pint glasses, and of course, by Swan Lake.
Fighter Jet Waltz (7
min) is for 1-3 dancers, and is a meditation on the zen-like
concentration of pilots who drop bombs and explode other planes in the
sky.
Flamingo Flamingo (7
min) is a duet that lands somewhere between Key West, Vegas, and a
Jersey Shore lawn ornament. Two birds quietly eat their krill
with short bouts of karaoke seizures.
Outreach includes Expandable
Habitats workshop – Japanese Butoh Training and Contemporary Dance
Theater Composition
Additional Outreach Available:
Lecture/Demonstration on Action Theater or Japanese Butoh, Lecture on
Butoh History
Performance Calendar
2011
December 2-4
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Triskelion Arts Presents Series (Brooklyn, NY) – No Country for Old
Women
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November 11-12
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Dixon Place (application pending)
(New York, NY) – This Ain’t No Swan Lake
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2012
March TBA
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The Tank Presents Series (New York, NY) – invitation, dates to be
confirmed – No Country for Old Women
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April TBA
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Performance Mix Festival Dixon Place (application pending)
(New York, NY) - This Ain’t No Swan Lake
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