Artist Story: Julia Rhoads

Photo: Karen Wade Graphic Design: Carol Genetti

I founded Lucky Plush Productions (LPP) in 1999 as a platform for movement research, cross-disciplinary collaborations, and performance experiments. With the passing of this first milestone anniversary, I’ve been thinking a lot about my original goals, as well as the countless inquiries that subsequently propelled me forward.The work that I have created in collaboration with LPP’s various dedicated ensembles has challenged my assumptions about the body, composition, improvisation, subjectivity, the relationship between dance, performance and technology, and the movement itself.  And so I keep going. 

When I began planning Lucky Plush’s anniversary season, I had the (somewhat common) impulse to revisit favorite works from the past decade.  But as our company primarily presents evening-length works as opposed to mixed repertory concerts, it seemed a more fitting challenge to re-contextualize movements, images and ideas from the past 10 years into a brand new evening-length work. The concert would speak to the culturally relevant phenomenon of sampling and appropriating of art to create new work, while providing the framework to revisit favorite company moments.  As is often the case, my projections changed.  The more I played with sampling and appropriating dance, the less I became concerned with tying the concert to LPP’s past.  The work seems to be revealing itself through the research I am pursuing with the ensemble, whether derived from our own past work, YouTube and related internet sites, or personal memories of other choreographers’ work.  Although sampling choreography (often from a reversed, 2-dimensional and degraded version of the "original") is cumbersome and inorganic, I believe the best discoveries will be mined on the path between attempt and failure. 

I had the good fortune of receiving a choreographic fellowship from the Maggie Alessee National Center for Choreography (MANCC) to support the research and initial development of Punk Yankees, which is the title of our anniversary concert. While at MANCC, I began working with the ensemble to address my research questions: What defines "fair use" in dance? Is it permissible to "borrow" choreographic devices if the movement is reinvented? If the dancers can't execute the movement in the way it was originally intended, is there something interesting about that failure? If someone "stylistically" references a choreographer, should it be acknowledged as a derivative work, or is it what naturally occurs through dance education and lineage? Ultimately what we created was a work-in-progress that experimented with meta-theatrical devices and formal conventions to elucidate these provocative questions with transparency and humor.

The title Punk Yankees came from some research I was doing online about piracy and art.   Matt Mason, author of the book The Pirate’s Dilemma, talks about the fact that piracy and appropriation (in the sense of intellectual property) has historically been linked to the creation of new markets, which he calls a form of “punk” capitalism.  He also traces the word “Yankee” to an old Dutch slang word “Janke,” meaning pirate.  Ironically, Matt Mason was recently a keynote speaker at Dance/USA’s Annual Conference in Houston, TX (June 3-6), in the session “Fair Use and Piracy: How They Each Support a Sustainable Dance Field.”

With the vast amount of appropriation that is happening in both dance and pop culture, it is my intention that this project will also address how "sampling" brings up difficult questions with respect to identity politics. As choreography is mediated by the body, exact copies of movement cannot be made, unlike samples in digital music. Therefore, issues of race, gender, sexual orientation and ability have taken a front seat in rehearsal discussions at various times.  Punk Yankees is riddled with paradoxes around cultural appropriation in the postmodern era, and I hope to imbue it with a new bodily discourse that speaks directly to these problems.

New technologies:

In connection with Punk Yankees, I collaborated with web technologist Ian Hatcher to develop a website for ongoing user interaction around this project, Steal this Dance(.com) a play on Abbie Hoffman's Steal this Book (1971). The site includes the following elements:

* Videos of the company's past works, as well as current rehearsal footage, supplied for site users to create derivative works. Those who "steal" our work may choose whether or not to pay us for the material, provoking questions about the monetary value of choreography.

* A blog for discussion and to take requests from users as to what they wish us to sample or respond to on YouTube.

* A bibliography & reference links to media and writing that deals with sampling, appropriation, and copyright law.

* A way for users to post their own videos to the site, both in response to our material and to share their own choreography.

* Users also have the opportunity to pay the company for inclusion of their choreography in Punk Yankees. Intended to subvert the materiality of copyright, users will submit video of dance that, as copyrightable material, is a potential form of currency, which they can pay to have transformed into a physical state-- live performance by a professional company.

Live production:

While Punk Yankees will culminate in an evening-length work, the performances will have grown out of structures of reciprocity and communication on the internet and the show will transparently reference its digital roots on stage. I am considering the use of a streaming "choreo-bibliography" to reference sources, and using computers as physical objects.  With functional internet access terminals on stage, dancers can also potentially interact via videoconferencing and web cams.

In Punk Yankees, we seek to question the relationship between dance and currency: physical material captured in copyrightable digital media, exchanged, and then realized with new embodiment, its form becoming again fundamentally ephemeral-- and un-copyrightable. 

Julia Rhoads is a choreographer and Artistic Director of Lucky Plush Productions, a dance theater company that has facilitated the relationship between dance, performance, and new media technologies since 1999.  Described as “Chicago’s resident surrealist” in the Chicago Sun-Times, her work has been presented in venues and universities across the U.S. including commissions for Alaska Dance Theater, Mordine & Company Dance Theater, and twice for River North Chicago Dance Company.  She has also directed and choreographed for theater, performance and film companies including Redmoon Theater, Walkabout Theater, Hyperdelic, and the interdisciplinary collective M5.  Rhoads is formerly a company member of the San Francisco Ballet, a performer and artistic associate of XSIGHT! Performance Group, and she has been a guest artist with Beppie Blankert Danceworks, the Itinerant Theater Guild, and Baubo Performance Project.

Rhoads has received a Cliff Dwellers Award for Choreography, two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist Award, a fellowship from the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, and Lucky Plush Productions was featured on the cover of Time Out Chicago for the article “5 reasons to love dance in Chicago.” Rhoads earned a BA in History from Northwestern University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute Chicago, and she is currently a faculty member in the theater department at Columbia College Chicago.
 

Celebrating 10 Years of Collaborating Artists:
Josh Abrams * Julie Ballard * Annie Arnoult Beserra * John Boesche * Jeremy Blair * Lia Bonfilio * Alex Brenneman * Rachel Bunting * Peter Carpenter * Cat Chow * Asimina Chremos * Molly Cofman * Robbie Cook * Noé Cuéllar * Charlie Cutler * Winston Damon * Erin Derstine * Autumn Eckman * Kate Elswit * Kristina Fluty * Nicole Garneau * David Gerber * Kim Larimore Goldman * Krenly Guzman * Sue Haas * Jeff Hancock * Carrie Hanson * Ian Hatcher * Timothy Heck * Susan Hoffman * Brian Jeffery * Benn Jordan * Atalee Judy * Misha Kaschock * Jocelyn Kelvin * Logan Kibens * Marianne Kim * Benjamin Law * Katie Leander * Elizabeth Lentz * Christine Lutz * Marc Macaranas * Kirsty Mackellar * Cheryl Mann * Kathleen Matuszewich * Stephan Mazurek * Hogan McLaughlin * Jennifer Meek * Mark Messing * Lara Miller * Martha Mulligan * Margaret Nelson * Kevin O’Donnell * Amy Page * David Pavkovic * Aaron Preusse * Michael Quinn * Joseph Ravens * Kevin Rechner * Julia Rhoads * Michael Rioux * Stefen Robinson * Joanna Rosenthal * Holly Rothschild * Luke Rothschild * Denise Sanchez * Jon Sherman * Eliza Shin * Sheldon B. Smith * Nefertiti Thomas * Jorge Troestch * Josh Weckesser * Zachary Whittenburg * Meghann Wilkinson * Marshelle Williams * Julia Wollrab * Lisa Wymore * Daniel Zox