Nichole Canuso’s Fringe Festival Duet at APS Museum Continues with Four Additional Performances this Fall

Press Contact:

Maria Hooper (856) 316-8664 or maria@nicholecanusodance.org

Nichole Canuso Dance Company

Photos available upon request

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

 

Return Return Departure

Nichole Canuso’s Fringe Festival Duet at the APS Museum Continues

with Four Additional Performances this Fall

October 5th – December 8th

Philadelphia, PA, October 2012 – Following a successful, sold-out run during the Fringe Festival, NCDC will perform Return Return Departure on four additional afternoons from October 5 – December 8. The show will close with a reception and artist meet-and-greet following the last performance.

Just before sunset, two dancers meet in the garden and a duet unfolds, marking the start of Return Return Departure by Nichole Canuso Dance Company (NCDC). Commissioned by the American Philosophical Society (APS) Museum on the occasion of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, NCDC has created a series of duets and corresponding videos, in conjunction with the museum’s current exhibition Tempus Fugit: Time Flies, designed by contemporary artist Antonia Contro.

Deb Miller of Stage Magazine calls Return Return Departure “heady and exquisite, moving and evocative. It’s a show that you’ll want to see evolve over time, so plan to visit more than once, as the summer turns into autumn and the videotapes accumulate.” NCDC’s extended engagement through the Fall offers audience members the unique opportunity to experience this shifting dance, and the resulting accumulative videos, multiple times throughout its run.

This genre-bending dance explores our complex relationship to time and furthers NCDC’s ongoing interest in pulling dance outside of the theater (TAKES, 2010; Wandering Alice, 2008). The performance begins as the audience gathers in the APS Museum gallery at 104 South 5^th Street, across from the Jefferson Garden, to reflect on Antonia Contro’s Tempus Fugit exhibition. From there, they make their way across the street to the garden where musical composition by long-time NCDC collaborator Michael Kiley fills the air as the sun sets. The audience members engage in suggested actions meant to encourage a contemplation of time, and take their seats.

As the dance ensues, both dancers, Nichole Canuso and John Luna, wield cameras, filming from within the confines of the dance, generating distinct perspectives that diverge and converge over the course of the performance. After each live performance, the resulting films will be posted in the gallery, side by side, accumulating with each new performance. The evolving videos reflect changes in the weather, the seasonal shifting of the sun, record the new audiences, and represent the dancer’s energetic shifts as they embody the passing of time. The audience will witness the live unfolding of the dance as well as the resulting films displayed in the gallery. 

“Return Return Departure received such a warm welcome over the course of the Fringe Festival in September. As we move into the second phase of performances, I’m excited to see the dance evolve and discover new changes in the audience and environment as we compile the video footage from each show,” says choreographer and dancer Nichole Canuso.

“Canuso’s and Luna’s every-changing performance and simultaneous filming over a period of months explicitly marks time’s passage and provides a brilliant and dynamic counterpoint to the quiet, but powerful meditation on time evoked in Contro’s exhibition,” says Founding Director and Curator of the APS Museum Sue Ann Prince.

 

Nichole Canuso Dance Company: Return Return Departure

Upcoming Performance Dates and Times                                                                                       

Saturday 10/20, 5:00pm

Saturday 11/17, 3:30pm

Saturday 12/8, 3:30pm, followed by a closing reception in the APS Museum galleries

 

Location

American Philosophical Society Museum

104 South 5^th Street, just south of Chestnut Street

 

Run Time

40 minutes

 

Tickets:

Tickets are $12 and are available through Brown Paper Tickets at NCDCatAPS.brownpapertickets.com

 

The Exhibition: Tempus Fugit

Award-winning Chicago artist Antonia Contro has selected books, manuscripts, and curiosities from the APS collections and juxtaposed them with her own contemporary art, including drawings, paintings, videos and a sound installation. Contro’s artful display explores how we try to capture, measure, and find meaning in the midst of time’s inevitable passage.

 

About Nichole Canuso Dance Company

NCDC creates virtuosic and engaging dance-based works that explore the complexity of human experience. Choreographer Nichole Canuso blends full-bodied dance technique and idiosyncratic gesture to make dance that examines the role of the audience, providing windows for the viewer to engage intimately and directly with the work.  Recent Live Arts/Fringe productions include TAKES (2010) and Wandering Alice (2008).

 

About the APS Museum

The American Philosophical Society (APS) Museum, located next door to Independence Hall in Philadelphia’s historic district, hosts exhibitions that explore history, art, and science in creative and thought‐provoking ways. In conjunction with each exhibition, the museum commissions innovative works by visual artists, musicians, poets, performers, dancers, and others. These original works interpret the themes and objects on view, linking them to relevant issues today.

 

Nichole Canuso, Choreography

Nichole is the artistic director of Nichole Canuso Dance Company. She is a company member of Headlong Dance Theater and has performed and collaborated with Theater Exile, Karen Bamonte Dance Works, Group Motion Dance Company, and Pig Iron Theater Company with whom she co-created and toured a three-woman clown play. In 2008 Canuso performed with Bill Irwin in The Happiness Lecture at the Philadelphia Theater Company. Nichole’s dancing, choreography and study have taken her to France, Scotland, Poland, Japan, and across the United States. Her work has been supported by The National Endowment for the Arts, The Knight Foundatio, a Bessie Shoenberg First Light Commission, The Leeway Foundation, the Independence Foundation, Dance Advance (a grant program funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and administered by the University of the Arts), The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Philadelphia Cultural Fund, and Ellen Foreman Memorial Award. Choreographic residencies include fellowship at Maggie Allesse National Center for Choreography (FL), Millay Colony for the Arts (NY), The New Edge Residency (CEC, Philadelphia), The Swarthmore Project (Swarthmore College, PA), The Choreographers Project (Susan Hess Dance Studio, Philadelphia), and the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Her work has been produced several times by the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe. Her most recent work, As the Eyes of the Seahorse was co-produced with the HERE Arts Center (NYC) in December 2010.