Visual artist Sarah Krepp in collaboration with THE SELDOMS Dance Co, opening at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, 2015
The Seldoms' "Power Goes," March 20 - 29
The Seldoms' "Power Goes" will be a tour de force! Amazing moving meditation on Power -- as it comes and it goes. Inspired by LBJ, a master manipulator himself.
The creative team includes The Seldoms ensemble, choreographer Carrie Hanson, playwright Stuart Flack, designer/typographer Bob Faust, sound designer/composer Mikhail Fiksel, costume designer Jeff Hancock, lighting designer Julie Ballard, visual artist Sarah Krepp and historian/dramaturg Michael J. Kramer.
"Power Goes" considers politics as performance, positing that making and implementing good legislation is not the ideal of “the best argument wins.” Rather, with successful performances on public stages of power and behind the scenes in intimate exchanges of influence individual and collective bodies lean in, bear down and rise up, agitating toward or away from social action in an uneven but unrelenting march.
Our bodies’ relationship to power infuses our language. We have an “appetite” for power. We “hunger” and “thirst” for it. We “chase” power. For her sumptuous new dance theater work, choreographer Carrie Hanson invited playwright Stuart Flack to collaborate with her dynamo dancers and design team—a first for The Seldoms—to take these linguistic cues in order to investigate how we understand and deploy power.
President Lyndon Baines Johnson certainly hungered for power—and knew how to wield it. Reading Robert Caro’s biographies of LBJ, inspired Hanson to create this work, recognizing that effective governance relies on successful performances—both public and private. Such displays of power established LBJ’s political career and helped push forward transformative legislation such as the Civil Rights Act and the Medicare Bill. In Power Goes, Hanson uses the figure of LBJ as a lens to view power more broadly and to ask if the robust political might that LBJ embodied can even be possible in the United States today.
Set off by current political gridlock, Hanson’s astute study of power—how it is acquired, taken, wielded; how it is expressed by the body; how it can be deployed for progressive action or conversely create gridlock—is a breakthrough in dance and theater collaboration. Hanson created the work with the playwright, The Seldoms dancers, visual artist Sarah Krepp, designer Bob Faust, sound designer Mikhail Fiksel, costume designer Jeffrey Hancock, lighting designer Julie Ballard, and historian Michael J. Kramer.
Chicagoan of the Year in Dance: The Seldoms' Carrie Hanson
"Politics and dance make strange bedfellows. Issue-oriented dance is generally either too oblique, burying the politics, or too overt, becoming preachy and unconvincing, except to the choir.
Balancing these two extremes, choreographer Carrie Hanson makes politically oriented pieces so passionate yet nuanced it can be difficult to say what her views are. Besides, her views aren't the point. Instead, she takes hard-hitting looks at charged issues from as many perspectives as possible — and in the process creates some of the liveliest, most entertaining dance theater around.”
-Laura Molzahn, Chicago Tribune