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Performances: Jen Kutler / Nancy Havlik's Dance Performance Group / Zizia

Saturday September 21 * 8pm * $10 * TICKETS

Jen Kutler - NY Multidisciplinary artist and performer. She modifies found objects that are cultural signifiers of power, gender, queerness and intimacy to create atypical instruments and sculptures. Her performances feature many of her instruments incorporated with immersive field recordings to explore common and discrepant experiences of familiar social tones in immersive sound and media environments.

Jen's performance Thank You for Listening is a series of compositions and improvisations for hand-made vibrator synthesizer. Dense textures and long melodies are produced by the vibrator synth's interference in guitar pickups and other electronics. The guitar pickups amplify the interference of the vibrator synth, even when it is inside of the performer's body to explore the potential for de-sexualization of a feminine spectrum body, even when engaged in what would ordinarily be considered a sexual act.

Nancy Havlik's Dance Performance Group Nancy Havlik has directed and choreographed for the past 25 years. She formed Dance Performance Group as a non-profit in 1989 to explore her own choreographic ideas with a small group of dancers and musicians. Her choreography has been performed extensively in the Washington, DC area at venues including Dance Place, Shakespeare Theater, Joy of Motion, Montgomery College, Jewish Community Center, Joe’s Movement Emporium, Mt. Vernon College and the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage. Her work has been shown in New York City at Joyce Soho, WAX and the Construction Company. Internationally her work has been seen in Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Nancy has directed site work performances all over the Washington, DC area in places as varied as Dance Loft on 14, The Torpedo Factory, The National Portrait Gallery, VisArts / Rockville, Josephine Butler Parks Center and Anderson House. The Dance Performance Group has been part of Atlas Theater Intersections, Velocity DC Dance Festival, Sonic Circuits and at Dance Place as part of their 2017 – 2018 season.

Nancy has received grants from Maryland State Arts Council, the Montgomery County Arts Council and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. She recently received a 2017 Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council.

For over 20 years Nancy has taught interactive creative movement workshops for older adults through Arts for the Aging (AFTA) and has directed Quicksilver Senior Dance Company, a dance improvisation performance company of people 65 and over for AFTA. Havlik received a MetLife Grant with visual artist Donna McKay through AFTA to present a series of workshops to frail seniors combining dance and visual art, gesture through space and gesture on paper.

Zizia (MA) composes and performs with environmental recordings, natural objects, and musical instruments. Zizia is Amber Wolfe and Jarrod Fowler. Wolfe composes scores from celestial maps corresponding to each concert. Fowler samples sounds from natural habitats surrounding each concert. Wolfe and Fowler harmonize cosmic and chthonic music to create site-specific performances.

Zizia released a self-titled debut on double-cassette in 2018: http://zizia.xyz/zizia.html. Zizia is an 80-minute cycle of four 20-minute tracks. Zizia was composed and produced from 2016-2018, designed by Moé Kamura and Zizia (http://zizia.xyz/z.jpg), and mastered by Taku Unami. Zizia is distributed by hibari music: https://www.hibarimusic.com/store/. A sample track is available online at http://zizia.xyz/flower.html.