From our friends at the Deviated Theatre...
Vivid New Version of creature Features Enhanced Aerial Choreography and More
DEVIATED THEATRE, whose mesmerizing dance operas are heralded for their spellbindingly compelling choreography, announces its homecoming to DC for the 7th annual INTERSECTIONS Festival. Presented by Atlas Performing Arts Center, the festival will feature over 100 performances from established and emerging artists from DC and beyond featuring cutting edge collaborations and fresh styles of art making. DEVIATED THEATRE will present their evening-length work, creature, on Friday, February 27, 2015 and Saturday February 28, 2015, which recently made DC Metro Theater Arts’ Best of 2014 in Dance.
“We are very excited to be presenting a vivid new version of creature once again in our hometown” says Kimmie Dobbs Chan, “and to partner up with the progressive energy at INTERSECTIONS festival. Already well received by D.C. audiences, creature is now a more fully refined and resonate tale, sprinkled with some fresh choreographic additions.”
Drawing from the same inspiration as “The Human Age” by Diane Ackerman and “Present Shock” by Douglass Rushkoff, creature, is an apocalyptic story by Choreographer Kimmie Dobbs Chan and Director Enoch Chan. The work highlights humanity’s tension in the digital age, as both creature and creator on planet earth, and evokes a sense of cosmic inter-reflection. In creature, a young boy, played by Gryphon Magnus, 9, and a scientist, played by Ryan Tumulty, 28 take audiences from a mundane industrial landscape through exuberant visions, prophetic nightmares, and back again, exposing the cobwebs of the contemporary human psyche and our struggle to cope with a rapidly changing world. The choreography, an intricate spectacle - at times ugly, beautiful, and haunting - mimics the interplay of light and dark that exists in all beings, and ushers forth a complete splintering of humankind. Here at the end of the known world, creature invites a re-imagining of our technological and ecological future.
CREATURE TICKETS and PERFORMANCE TIMES:
Tickets can be purchased online through Atlas INTERSECTIONS, $27.50 regular price, $22.00 for students and seniors.
VENUE INFORMATION:
Sprenger Theatre is located at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H Street Northeast, Washington, DC 20002, and is about a 20-25 minute walk from the Union Station Metro Stop on the MetroRail station.
REPERTORY:
creature
Artistic Directors: Kimmie Dobbs & Enoch Chan Choreography & Sound Design: Kimmie Dobbs Chan Technical Direction & Lighting Design: Enoch Chan Combat Training: Chris Morrison
Aerial Coaching: Nina Charity Costume Design: Andy Christ
creature, highlights humanity’s paradox as both creatures in and creators of our modern planet. Human exuberance resonates through whimsical scientists in a steam- punk-meets-digital-age industrial landscape. Here, the timelines of a scientist and a young boy intertwine during episodic visions of a fantastical apocalypse. Together, they bear witness as humankind splinters into the ‘born’ and the ‘made’ at the dawn of a new world. creature, calls to focus our species’ unique struggle to survive our own technologies and our own shadow, as well as our unique powers and potentials to redefine what it means to be natural, and what it means to be human.
About DEVIATED THEATRE:
Husband and wife team, Kimmie Dobbs Chan and Enoch Chan, founded DEVIATED THEATRE in 2008. The pair utilizes a mix of dance, acting, and aerials to tell fantastical stories of other worlds in order to shed light on the human condition. Choreographer Kimmie Dobbs Chan’s movement, at times pedestrian and precise, resonates with Director Enoch Chan's enigmatic aesthetic to evoke powerful and even haunting imagery. The pair tours with a dozen performers for each original production and has performed nationally at venues including The Kennedy Center in D.C. and Ailey Citigroup Theater in New York. The company has been awarded the Individual Artists Award for Choreography from the Maryland State Arts Council (2014, 2011), Mark Ryder Original Choreography Grant (2012), and the John F. Kennedy Center Local Dance Commission (2011). Choreographer Kimmie Dobbs Chan was voted Audience Favorite at the 2013 Breaking Glass Project in New York, and the company named Best Dance Company by the Washington City Paper in 2012. DEVIATED THEATRE is based in the Washington D.C./Baltimore Metro area.
