Press Release:
We are all homeless.
We all need a home.
Daniel Burkholder/The PlayGround explores concepts of home, leaving home, finding home and the absence of home in a unique performance experience featuring a live internet broadcast, spontaneous solos for individual audience members and its signature athletic movement style.
What: premiere of Worship/Home
When: April 21 & 22, 2012 (Saturday @ 8pm, Sunday @ 7pm)
Where: Joe’s Movement Emporium
3309 Bunker Hill Road, Mount Rainier, MD 20712
Tickets: $20 General Admission, $15 Students, Seniors, Artists The company will premiere Worship/Home, their newest venture in audience participation, internet broadcasts and movement exploration. Developing from Director Daniel Burkholder’s interest in issues around immigration, Worship/Home asks what does it mean to create a new home, how much do you take with you and how much must you leave behind? Performed in-the-round, the work will include unique audience engagement through spontaneous solos for individual audience members, athletic movement phrases and personal reflections about home.
As a further investigation into audience and performer relationships, the audience will be divided in half at each performance with one section of the audience watching the performance live while the other stays in the lobby watching the internet broadcast on monitors during the first half of the performance. At intermission the audience with switch places and watch the piece again from the other view point - either live or on monitors. The internet broadcast will also be available for viewing by anyone in the world with internet capability.
Asked about the multi-layered approach of this work, Artistic Director Daniel Burkholder responds, “In this work we’re interested in the metaphor of home as being a place of intimacy, of closeness. By structuring the work to relate to audiences in different amounts of closeness - from the one-on-one solos we’ll be doing for individual audience members, to the difference between watching the work live or as a video projection, to the people who will watch it many miles away on their computers, we’ll be layering levels of intimacy between the audience and the performers. I’m very excited to see how this plays out with our ability to perform across multiple medias at the same time as well as the meanings and interpretations for the audience as they view it in multiple and various ways.”
Created and performed by Daniel Burkholder with Kathryn Harris Banks, Stefanie Quinones Bass, Christine Stone Martin, Carrie Monger, and Keira Hart Mendoza. Music by Chad Speed and various artists.
Daniel Burkholder / The PlayGround is a movement based performance group engaging audiences through dynamic work combining the formalism of choreography with the spontaneity of improvisation. By layering movement ranging from highly athletic to subtle gestures with text, live music and video the company considers multiple perspectives as it presents accessible, yet complex performances works. The company has presented work throughout the Mid-Atlantic and Metro/DC region at venues as varied as The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Dance Place, The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, Transformer, Carter Barron Amphitheater, on the sidewalk in front of the Martin Luther King Library, Bladensburg Waterfront Park along the Anacostia River, The H Street Playhouse and Warehouse Theater as well as performances in New York City and San Francisco. In the fall of 2003 The PlayGround premiered Buried in the Sky during a 5-week run with over 20 performances. In 2005 the company was awarded a Local Dance Commissioning Project commission from The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to create together/apart (we go each our way). In 2006 was awarded a Metro DC Dance Award for “Outstanding Performance by a Group in a Dance Production”. Also in 2006, as part of the inaugural Capital Fringe Festival, Daniel Burkholder and composer and musician Jonathan Matis premiered unmapped, a 30-minute duet that was performed on the hour, every hour, for 24 hours. In 2009 the company completed a 3-year project, My ocean is never blue, in a collaboration with Archne Aerial Arts (aerial dance), Coyaba Dance Theater (West African dance) and Devi Dance Theater (Traditional Indian dance). Recent projects include: Scenic Route, a 3 hour hike interspersed with site specific performances along the Potomac River; Primary/Scale, an all day performance instillation at the Northern Virgina Fine Arts Festival; and, The Chemistry of Lime Trees, an evening length theatrical work using historical stories to explore how borders, real or perceived, separate people. In January 2011 Daniel Burkholder/The PlayGround became the dance company in residence at Georgetown University Hospital, offering dance and movement sessions to patients, nurses, doctors, administrative staff and support personal, as well as on-site performances.
