DIRT: LAND/USE

DIRT: LAND/USE

Three weekends of performance, dance, readings and vidoes about how we shpae the land and how the land shapes us curated by Links Hall Artistic Associate Deke Weaver. 

Weekend One – March 5 – 7, 2010

Public Phenomena

Friday /March 5/ 8pm *

*talk back with Daniel Tucker followed by opening night reception 

featuring Temporary Services

Temporary Services’ premieres a photo performance inspired by its 2008 book Public Phenomena – the result of over ten years of photographic documentation and research on the variety of modifications and inventions people make in public – called “absolutely fascinating and incredibly life affirming” by the Wooster Collective.

The Mountains of Illinois

(please note early start time on Saturday 3/6)

Saturday/ March 6/ 7:30pm *  &  Sunday / March 7/ 7pm

*talk back with Daniel Tucker following Saturday’s performance

featuring Bonnie Fortune, Alan & Michael Fleming, Kevin Hamilton, Audrey Petty,

and Temporary Travel Office.

In an evening of literal and figurative journeys of shifting landscapes, performances and readings, audiences will embark on a parking lot tour of Wrigleyville with Temporary Travel Office and return to Links Hall to scale Bonnie Fortune’s sound-installation One Landscape for Another: Ghost Mountain. Recorded at the Abbott Power Plant, the title refers to the amount of coal used per day to produce electricity. Alan and Michael Fleming’s video/photo/ performance work on space, presence, and the body leads to Audrey Petty’s childhood summer road trips through obscure Midwestern towns and Kevin Hamilton’s account of how mountains came to be identified with the divine.

Weekend Two – March 12 – 14, 2010

Water

Friday & Saturday /March 12* & 13**/ 8pm  

*talk back with conservationist and Openlands CEO Gerald W. Adelmann following Friday’s performance

**talk back with environmental ethicist Michael Scoville following Saturday’s performance

featuring Jennifer Monson and BD Collier

Choreographer/performer Jennifer Monson’s new Mahomet Aquifer Project draws the audience into their own understanding of their relationship to water in a multi-layered performance experience while BD Collier’s darkly comic performance/lecture traces the deadly flying carp taking over Illinois waterways.

Oranges and Snowstorms

Sunday / March 14 / 7pm

featuring Karin Hodgin-Jones, Nadia Jassim,, Kyli Kleven, Daniel Rudin, Steve May and Ryan Thompson

A family farm bisected by I-74, a Nicaraguan fortress turned municipal dump, oranges in winter – in an evening of live performances and short film screenings, five artists acknowledge and critique individual and collective complicity in unsustainable global systems and structures and the transformative power or careful and thoughtful attention to the seemingly small decisions of the everyday.

Weekend Three – March 19 – 21, 2010

Leaves of Silent Spring Grass

Friday/ March 19 / 8pm

featuring Jennifer Allen, Nadia Jassim, Steve May, Chris Peck, Marissa Perel, Zoe Schwartz, and Ryan Thompson

Sing the body electric in a series of short performances inspired by Silent Spring by Rachel Carson and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Audiences are encouraged to bring their own musical instrument.

The Land of Plenty

Saturday/ March 20 / 8pm  & Sunday/ March 21/ 7pm

featuring Deke Weaver, Chris Peck and Jennifer Allen

DIRT concludes with curator Deke Weaver’s video, real human beings and living sound performance that hops back and forth over the fuzzy gray line that defines kooks and saints, sentimental mumbo jumbo and deeply felt ritual, New Age cheese and the breathtaking, the haunting, the disturbingly beautiful.  Sing-alongs, dancing sandhill cranes, cowboy songs, Led Zeppelin guitar solos, evil bunny prayers, the (fictional) collaboration between John Cage and Karl Marx, a re-enactment of “A Discussion of Form” juxtaposed with the “sacred geometry” of crop circles, The Land of Plenty is  a meditation on the Great Plains, the natural world, and myth.

Tickets are $15 ($12 online) for general admission/ $10 ($8 online) for students

Weekend Pass (good for all performances in one weekend) $20 for general admission/ $15 for Students

DIRT Cheap Festival Pass (good for all performances, all three weekends) $25

To purchase tickets click on like below: