GIMP Background
"GIMP beautifully resets preconceptions about bodies and movement."
The New Yorker
Performance Life
GIMP Premiered In Albuquerque, NM, November 2008, at the North Fourth Arts Center. GIMP'S NYC Premiere was in March 2009 @ Henry Street Settlement's Abrons Arts Center, followed by Boston's Institute for Contemporary Art. IF premiered in New York City, June 2011, at the LaMama Moves Dance Festival.
Excerpts have been performed at: Kennedy Center, Wash.; Boston University, Boston; Judson Church, Dance New Amsterdam and Dance Theater Workshop, NYC; Woodstock Playhouse, NY; Biograph/Victory Gardens Theater, Chicago; Rutgers University; St Joseph's College; Hofstra University; Beloit College; Dubrovnik and Zagreb, Croatia. GIMP was the featured performance for the NY Realabilities Festival, NYC and will be featured at the Society for Arts in Healthcare's Conference in Buffalo, April 2009. GIMP has ongoing performances with Hospital Audiences, Inc. in NYC.
During fall 2006, Heidi Latsky began an intensive period of creation with bi-lateral amputee, Lisa Bufano, a Boston-based interdisciplinary artist and 2006-07 Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art Recipient. This marked a significant shift of focus for the company and a period of immense growth. The company received an ARC grant through Pentacle that included mentoring Latsky for a period of 18 months. GIMP premiered in Albuquerque, NM, November, 2008, at the North Fourth Arts Center. Since then, GIMP has been performed at the Abrons Arts Center (NYC), Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), The Kennedy Center (DC), Holy Cross University (MA), CAP Awards (The Netherlands), The Reelabilities Film Festival at the Jewish Community Center (NYC), The Flynn Theater (Burlington), Dublin Dance Festival, Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Scripps College Humanities Institute, DaDaFest in Liverpool and Chicago Humanities Festival, Roger Williams University (RI), Alverno Presents!(WI), CREA Conference in Kathmandu, and Barnard College.
Additional venues include the Crossing Borders Festival in Dusseldorf, ICA (Boston) and the Pittsburgh Dance Council. GIMP is the subject of a feature length documentary by Richard Move, an Associated Press multi-media piece, and features on CNN and NET and NPR. A profile on GIMP (Channel 12 News) was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2010. That same year, the company was in residency at the JCC Manhattan where they created IF. HLD has an extensive outreach program.
Director's Notes
Embracing its Oxford definitions, GIMP brings audiences a visceral and emotional experience with performers whose unique attributes, physical and otherwise, are honored and utilized in highly dynamic, virtuosic and provocative performances, discussions and workshops and outreach activities. The dancers in GIMP have unique limbs ranging from overly agile joints, absent limbs, foreshortened limbs, crooked limbs to exceptionally overdeveloped muscles.
GIMP is about beauty, not the photo-shopped, airbrushed kind, but a harsher more unexpected one that comes from the ultimate sexiness of risk-taking and utter commitment. It is about framing each person as a photographer would and then weaving those frames together in sensual and intimate ways and drawing the viewers in to see each person's unique beauty as each performer sees theirs. In GIMP, both audience and performers are aware of being watched. That provocative exchange in which our gaze is being reflected both ways leads to a shift, a questioning, and a deep sense that the frame/lens through which we view the world has somewhat changed.
People go to dance events to see what they cannot do themselves. Dancers are generally perceived as limitless; disabled persons as essentially unable. Bringing these two groups together in GIMP challenges conventional notions of dance, performance and body image. GIMP's unique palette of limbs offers an edgy landscape of uncommon beauty that examines the uncompromising ways we are often identified or defined by our physicality.
Performance Description
The 6 principal performers (half of them dancing for the first time) are: Artistic Director Heidi Latsky, nationally recognized disability rights speaker and commentator Lawrence Carter-Long, Disabled Artist /Activist Lezlie Frye, British Performance Artist Catherine Long, HLD's Associate Director Jeffrey Freeze, and company member Christina Briggs. The creative team includes, lighting designer Christopher Ash, Visual Artist Eva Mantell, Music Director Frank Ponzio and Composers Sxip Shirey, Chris Brierley, Randall Woolf, Marty Beller and Stan Strickland.
The prologue for GIMP is a live sculptural representation of the "braided fabric" definition. Two aerialists (Nate Crawford and Jennifer Bricker) manipulate hanging silks to create an ongoing interwoven world for themselves the audience views as they enter the venue. What makes this especially spectacular is that Jennifer was born without legs. The silks hang above a mylar reflective "puddle" that peaks out from underneath a bed of rose petals, earth and debris. Stan Strickland, a consummate jazz musician and performer is another sculptural element in the same space as the aerialists, accompanying them although remaining disconnected from them. As the audience enters the theater, they will be confronted with flashing images on a hanging scrim covering the span of the stage. This edgy, scrambled and random tapestry of images, created by Visual Artist, Eva Mantell, represents the biased lens through which most people view disability, difference and beauty-a lens we literally and figuratively break apart. These images continue as the dancing starts and slowly fade away although the scrim remains as a symbolic filter. The first two sections of GIMP are directly about the performers being watched through this lens. One of the dancers then pushes away the barrier and the focus of the show shifts as the dancers become less concerned with the audience and more internally focused and expressive about "being watched". The irony is as we break the fourth wall, there is actually less direct contact with the audience and the experience becomes more voyeuristic.
Heidi Latsky's ability to mine the talents of the people she works with has been honed over the past 20 years with her work with actors, The School for Film and Television, The AIDS Service Center of NYC and The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company.
GIMP is typical of Heidi Latsky's work: physically dynamic, full of grace, and emotionally potent. This groundbreaking company tackles the issues of 'integrated" dance with a vengeance, touching on sexuality, intimacy and the vulnerability and anger associated with being constantly watched and judged. With GIMP, Heidi Latsky is carving out a niche that is a culmination of her career and personal commitment to humanitarian concerns; creating an innovative, cutting edge and unparalleled vehicle for dialogue, increased understanding and ground breaking civic engagement.
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For Booking and more information please call or email Ivan Sygoda |