The Maggie Alleseee National Center for Choreography is excited to welcome Chicago-based artist, Ginger Krebs, to develop Escapes & Reversals, a performance that explores relationships between digital movement constructed for screens and exertion by live, gravity-bound bodies. The project investigates power differentials across technological divides, especially the way one party’s invisibility seems to require the exposure of another. It asks how technology might reinforce assumptions about socio-economic class.
Escapes & Reversals features percussive movement inspired by defense maneuvers, including prey animal survival strategies, training drills, and personal coping routines. These actions seem life-or-death one moment and cartoon-like the next. Other movement for the project originates from the dancers’ personal reflections about how and when they protect or make themselves available to others. Krebs wants to understand behaviors that function to negotiate visibility and access, especially in the face of increasing surveillance, targeted advertising, drone warfare, identity theft, and self-branding through social media.
Krebs is developing minimal, portable sets inspired by film shoots, hunting lures, and polar expedition gear that will frame the live action as if it were being composed for remote streaming. The sound design will deliberately drift between the action of the movement and the dramatization or misrepresentation of it. For example, the sound will sometimes consist of rhythms made by the performers’ bodies hitting the ground, while at other times their actions will be synced with sound effects from Mortal Kombat or the animated ESPN logo sequence.
At MANCC, Krebs and her collaborators will work to integrate the substantial range of material they’ve generated so far, and experiment with compositional strategies like rear-screen projection, voice over, and video that integrates aerial perspectives into the live performance. They look forward to making connections at FSU to research drone-assisted disaster recovery, web-based marketing algorithms, and perception in virtual reality environments.
Escapes & Reversals delves into illusions perpetuated by social hierarchies in late capitalist society. It marvels at human resourcefulness at a time when we may feel disempowered by our political, economic, and environmental circumstances. In the midst of rampant corporate manipulation and recklessness, Escapes & Reversals recognizes human efforts to speak back to systems of power as nothing less than revolutionary.
Work-in-Progress Showing
Monday, 2/18 @ 10:30am Montgomery Hall, Black Box Studio
RSVP to info@mancc.org to reserve a seat
See more on Ginger Krebs
Video Excerpts of Escapes & Reversals
Chicago Tribune review of Krebs’s 2016 work, Buffer Overrun
Video of Krebs’s solo, Escapes & Reversals
