Defibrillator is proud to present
WAVER PROJECT | Carole McCurdy
September 21, 22, 23 | 9PM

$10 advance ticket online, eventbrite.com/e/waver-tickets
$15 at the door

Carole McCurdy is a Chicago-based artist whose work addresses grief and anxiety, duty and resistance, and the absurd mysteries of embodiment. She received a 2016 Lab Artist award from the Chicago Dancemakers Forum and was a Fall 2016 Sponsored Artist at High Concept Laboratories. She’s been privileged to study with many masters of butoh, including Natsu Nakajima and Yoshito Ohno, and also with great teachers of Argentine tango. She has performed at spaces including the Chicago Cultural Center, Epiphany Dance, Links Hall, Hamlin Park, High Concept Laboratories, Defibrillator Gallery, and Movement Research (NY). In 2014 she danced under viaducts in downtown Chicago and then toured Indonesia with Nicole LeGette’s blushing poppy dance club. In 2008–09 she was awarded a six-month artistic residency at Links Hall, where she created and showed her ensemble piece Alas. For Redmoon Theater’s 2006 Twilight Orchard event in Columbus Park, McCurdy created A Cure for Scurvy, a performance installation one reviewer described as, “…an example of the way dread can be created virtually out of thin air.”

Performers Carole McCurdy, Pamela Strateman, Irene Hsiao, Geoff Guy, M Wu, Harlan Rosen, and Mina Büker explore the ways that two or more bodies can sometimes (but not entirely) become one. Combining influences from Argentine tango and butoh, WAVER features video design by Francesca Talenti and sound elements by Jajah Wu, Kurt Preston, and Eli Halpern.

WAVER comes from exploring a paradox embedded both in butoh practice and in social dance: the body has the greatest performative presence and freedom when our self-conscious will is absent. What happens when the focused intention is to be guided from near or far? The uncanny sense that our bodies do not belong to ourselves can produce horror or transcendence, and offers the opportunity to enlarge our embrace, even to the point of embracing loss. WAVER is a dance project about how we hold and are held, how we go when we let go. It’s about the dizzying moments of discovery when we realize that our mental maps have misled us—about our bodies, our culture, our world—and suddenly new spaces open up. Boundaries dissolve and materialize around and within us all the time. Even the act of walking redefines everything. And when we hug and walk together in a tight embrace, trying to share an axis, it yields a wavering mixture of simultaneous trust and doubt, a sweet little loss of self that morphs our understanding.

WAVER project is proudly supported by Chicago Dancemakers Forum, High Concept Laboratories, and 3Arts Projects.

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: Carole McCurdy, Chicago, Defibrillator, WAVER PROJECT, West Town