Chicago, IL — Links Hall is pleased to present Trio A / Trio B, a double bill featuring performances of "The Top" by New York-based Mark McCloughan's No Face Performance Group performed with Jaime Maseda and Melissa Krodman — and "Watching Me / Watching You" by Chicago-based artist Joshua Kent and his two collaborators Courtney Mackedanz and Matthew Nicholas.
Combining simple gestures and quotational pop, both works employ deceptively simple forms to open up conversations around larger issues of canons, presentation, and artifice in contrast to sincerity. Tickets $10. RSVP at www.linkshall.org .
Joshua Kent's performance, WATCHING ME / WATCHING YOU, explores the subtly of oppression within everyday gestures. Crafted in the shadow of accessible pornography and heavily mediated bodies, two men and one woman move within a sparse environment speaking words written by others and performing dances they acquired from television. As roles shift, viewers become increasingly aware of the complicated responsibilities at play, and simplified narratives of gender and race begin to fail. Gradually even the spectatorship of live performance is questioned, as those witnessing WATCHING ME / WATCHING YOU become challenged by their own roles within forces of domination.
THE TOP is an investigation of the bare minimum needed to sustain a dance, a performance, an audience's attention and focus, by the Philadelphia and NYC-based No Face Performance Group ( Jaime Maseda and Mark McCloughan ). Interrogating the tension between stillness and motion, minimalism and dynamism, silence and pop music, the piece invites viewers into a relationship with the performers that is at once open, direct, intimate, and confrontational. It toes the delicate line between dancing for others and dancing alone with grace, humor, and style, exploring how these presences can co-exist together in public.
Trio A / Trio B will be presented alongside an exhibition featuring Joshua Kent, Zoe Nelson, Mark McCloughan, and Angus McCullough, curated by Kate Bowen at ACRE Projects — 1345 W 19th St Chicago IL 60608. The Exhibition will run from August 5-28, 2016.
Links Hall's Programing Committee, Chaired by Cheryl Lynn Bruce and Julia Mayer have selected Trio A / Trio B to tour to Philadelphia and New York in the Fall of 2016 as part of Links Hall's Midwest Nexus Touring Exchange.
About the Artist:
Joshua Kent is an interdisciplinary artist working in live performance, writing, and sculpture. Their visual and performative practice explores desire and other interior movements and manifestations by way of material objects. Specifically concerned with the poetics of the commonplace, Ken't work is committed to the repurposing of both matter and gesture. Additionally, their immersive life practice is informed by work with social service programs addressing community engagement and social justice. For the last six years Joshua has lived and worked within intentional communities, attempting to blur the lines between a studio practice and daily labor.
No Face Performance Group No Face Performance Group is the collaborative project of artists Jaime Maseda and Mark McCloughan. Working as a duo and with a revolving group of associate artists, they make performance using a wide variety of processes and sources. Since the group was founded in 2007, it has created 15 original works. Most recently, No Face premiered the first two installments of Abbot Adam ( a performance series about desire, devotion, and deviant medieval nuns ) at FringeArts in Philadelphia.
About Midwest Nexus Touring Exchange
¨The Midwest Nexus Touring Exchange provides an opportunity for Chicago-based performing artists to develop relationships with artists, institutions, and organizations and throughout the US. The program offers direct financial support, tour preparation, mentorship, and performance space so artists can share their work beyond Chicago.
Links Hall's Programing committee selects two MWN projects annually. These projects must be nominated by a Chicago based presenter to be eligible for the touring subsidy. Projects are selected based on excellence of work and touring feasibility.
The Midwest Nexus Touring Exchange is part of Links' Scaffolding Project, underwritten by The Boeing Company.
About Links Hall
Links Hall encourages artistic innovation and public engagement by maintaining a facility and providing flexible programming for the research, development and presentation of new work in the performing arts.
Links Hall most effectively realizes its mission by serving as an artistic incubator and launch pad. Through its residency programs, artist-curated festivals, fiscal sponsorship program, co-presentations with self-producing artists, cabarets, performance series, workshops and low-cost studio rentals, Links provides a home for artists across all performance disciplines, at all stages in their careers. For 51weeks each year, Links encourages artists and audiences to take equal risk.
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Links Hall shares a building with Constellation at 3111 N. Western Avenue, Chicago, IL 60618-convenient to the Belmont/Clybourn & Western CTA Bus Stop in Chicago's Roscoe Village neighborhood. For more information call 773.281.0824 or visit www.LinksHall.org
Links Hall is supported by Alphawood Foundation, Arts Midwest Touring Fund, a program of Arts Midwest that is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional contributions from Illinois Arts Council Agency, the Crane Group and General Mills Foundation, City of Chicago, Creative Capital Foundation Bloomberg Philanthropies, The Boeing Company, A CityArts grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, Illinois Arts Council Agency, John D. and Catherine T., MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions, MacArthur Foundation International Connections Fund, The MacArthur Fund for Arts and Culture at The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, Martha Struthers Farley and Donald C. Farley, Jr. Family Foundation, Robert R. McCormick Foundation, MidAtlantic Arts Foundation through USArtists International in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, National Performance Network, Puppet Slam Network, The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, Robert R. McCormick Foundation, TicketFly, Weasel Fund and many, many generous individuals.
