Now in their thirteenth season, The Seldoms create bold, thought-provoking dance that is driven by inquiry into contemporary issues, the history of art and ideas, and reflection on individual experiences. Known for their collaborations with visual artists, architects, composers, and fashion designers, the Chicago-based dance company has designed multi-disciplinary, site-specific performances in a variety of unconventional settings.

On November 5, The Seldoms will perform segments from their newest undertaking, RockCitizen—an inquiry into counterculture, rock music, and citizenship. In addition to the performance, The Seldoms' artistic director Carrie Hanson will lead a discussion about the multi-disciplinary, creative process behind the company's work.

The Seldoms are alchemists of artistic media who believe that movement—along with image, sound, text, and location—can expand action and environment into larger restless visions. Since 2001, the company has performed widely in Chicago, notably at the MCA, the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, and at The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago; at national venues including Joyce SoHo in New York; and internationally in Russia, Canada and Taiwan. The group has received numerous grants and awards, including a 2014 National Performance Network Creation Fund and a National Dance Project Production Grant.

Carrie Hanson, artistic director of The Seldoms, is a dance artist and educator. Since founding The Seldoms in 2001, she has made over twenty-five original works for the company. Interested in unconventional performance settings, she has placed dance in a cargo container, an Olympic-sized outdoor pool, and an architectural salvage store. She was a 2005 Chicago Dancemaker’s Forum Lab Artist, has twice been awarded an Illinois Arts Council Choreographic Fellowship, and received a Ruth Page Award for Performance. In 2012, Hanson was named one of “25 to Watch” by Dance Magazine.

Image: Photo Brian Kuhlmann

Related Links
The Seldoms
http://theseldoms.org

The Graham Foundation is pleased to continue its ongoing partnership with Lampo this fall with the premiere of Rene Hell’s “Bifurcating a Resounding No!” on Saturday, October 11. This latest project from Rene Hell draws from years of recorded sounds (acoustic instruments, field recordings, and voice) that the artist collected in cities across the U.S. and then shaped using various digital techniques.

Jeff Witscher a.k.a. Rene Hell (b. 1983, Long Beach, Calif.) is a visual artist, avid chess player, and music obsessive who has explored a variety of underground styles since his teens. His aesthetic choices, expressed over dozens of recordings released under many pseudonyms, have anticipated the shifts in U.S. experimental music spanning the last decade. Most recently, he received acclaim for synth albums Porcelain Opera and The Terminal Symphony (Type), a 2012 split release with Oneohtrix Point Never, and his newest recording, Vanilla Call Option (PAN). Witscher’s practice is peripatetic—roving styles, changing monikers and wide-ranging influences. Travel is central to Vanilla Call Option, with its digital palette constructed on the move between airports, performance spaces, and public libraries, to evoke the musique concrète of Bernard Parmegiani and the computer music of Charles Dodge. Witscher lives in Los Angeles.

This performance is presented in partnership with Lampo. Founded in 1997, Lampo is a non-profit organization for experimental music, sound art, and intermedia projects. Visit www.lampo.org. 

On Monday, October 6, writer and curator Justin McGuirk will discuss his new Graham-funded book, Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture. In this newly published title from Verso, McGuirk examines social and activist architecture in cities across Latin America.

Edwin Heathcote writes in the Financial Times: "In his fine and timely book Radical Cities, [McGuirk] takes a road trip to seek out not only the problems caused by rapid growth but also the most radical and influential ideas to have emerged in response over the past couple of decades...an intriguing picture of an activist urbanism and architecture that has made a real difference."

Justin McGuirk is a writer, critic, and curator based in London. He is the director of Strelka Press, the publishing arm of the Strelka Institute in Moscow. He has been the design critic of The Guardian, the editor of Icon magazine, and the design consultant to Domus. In 2012 he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture for an exhibition he curated with Urban Think Tank. His book, Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture was published by Verso in spring 2014.

Image: Anonymous, "A view of the squatted Torre Confinanzas, Caracas, Venezuela." Photo: Justin McGuirk.

Related Grant: Justin McGuirk, Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture (Verso, 2014).

Chip Lord, cofounder of the experimental architecture collective Ant Farm, will reflect on his participation in one of the Halprins’ early collaborative workshops and the influence that this experience had on his later work.

Chip Lord was trained as an architect and was a founding member of the experimental art and architecture collective Ant Farm (1968-1978). Dedicated to finding alternatives to mainstream architectural practice, Ant Farm worked at the fringe of architecture, producing inflatable structures, organizing performances and media events, and exploring nomadic design.  Ant Farm achieved widespread notoriety in the 1970s for such projects as House of the Century (1972), a ferro-cement weekend House in Texas, which won a Progressive Architecture Design Citation in 1971, and Cadillac Ranch (1974), an iconic work that is both public art and entropic sculpture and crosses disciplinary boundaries. Ant Farm also produced the video art classics Media Burn and The Eternal Frame, both in 1975. Following his involvement with Ant Farm, Lord continued to work in video and produced single channel tapes and installations, often collaborating with other artists. Lord has taught at the University of California, San Diego and the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he is Professor Emeritus in Film & Digital Media.

Image: The Clean Air Pod by Ant Farm at U.C. Berkeley on the first Earth Day, 1970. Courtesy Chip Lord.

For more information on the exhibition, Experiments in Environment: The Halprin Workshops, 1966-1971, click here.

Courtesy of the Lawrence Halprin Collection, the Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

Please joins us to celebrate the opening of our fall exhibition.

For more information on the exhibition, Experiments in Environment: The Halprin Workshops, 1966-1971, click here.

PREVIOUS POSTS NEW POSTS