The Seldoms / POWER GOES

Contemporary Dance Theater (CDT) is delighted to announce the second concert of its 44th Guest Artist Season.

The Seldoms, from Chicago, led by Artistic Director Carrie Hanson, return to Cincinnati after 5 years.  They are bringing one of their most powerful new works to Cincinnati, for Inauguration weekend.

The company will present Power Goes, a dance-theater work that explores the nature of political power and its relationship to social action and change.  Carrie Hanson read and was intrigued by Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson in which LBJ’s thirst for power, his cunning and his achievements as Senate Majority Leader and later as President are detailed.  Carrie and her company in this piece, consider politics as performance, which certainly resonates today.  It is not about “the best argument winning” but about the persuasion, coercion and best performance winning.   But in today’s political “shutdown” where are the LBJ’s who can get things moving, where is the leadership in American politics?

Power Goes is a dance theater work combining physical action and contemporary dance, spoken word, sound design including recorded voice and historical recordings, visual design including text/video/photo, and installation incorporating both literal (object) and abstract (painterly) gestures. The creative team includes The Seldoms ensemble, choreographer Carrie Hanson, playwright Stuart Flack, visual artist Sarah Krepp and designer/typographer Bob Faust, sound designer/composer Mikhail Fiksel, lighting designer Julie Ballard, and historian Michael Kramer. The work premiered in September 2014 at XFEST, a festival of experimental physical theater at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, and had its Chicago premiere in an extended two-week engagement at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Power Goes comes to Cincinnati with the support of the New England Foundation for the Arts, the National Performance Network for which the work received an NPN Creation Fund Award, the Otto M Budig Foundation, the Ohio Arts Council, the Wohlgemuth Herschede Foundation and other local foundations and individual supporters.

MEET-THE-ARTISTS RECEPTION
Meet The Seldoms at a reception following Friday evening’s performance at the Aronoff. FREE

OPEN MASTERCLASSES
TAKE CLASS WITH THE SELDOMS, SATURDAY, JAN 21

Dancers, don’t miss these incredible opportunities to take Masterclasses with The Seldoms at Contemporary Dance Theater’s studios in College Hill!

Modern Masterclass: Saturday, January 21, 2017 from 10:30am-12:00pm. $15 in advance payable here, or $19-20 at-the-door.

LECTURE/DEMONSTRATIONS & OUTREACH
While the company is in Cincinnati they will include a “Bodies on the Gears” workshop that invites students and/or community participants to explore questions raised by Power Goes, including issues of power, politics, negotiation, conflict, cooperation, justice, civil rights and social change.  The workshop uses dance and movement as avenues into both history and continued relevance of people’s movements.  Participants from the workshop and the material they create can be included in the performance in a section of the work.