Carleton presents A Shared Evening Of Dance

May 22, 2016

On Tuesday, May 24 at 7:30 p.m. in the Weitz Center for Creativity Theater, Carleton College is pleased to present A Shared Evening of Dance: Rosy Simas and Deborah Jinza Thayer. This special performance by these two renowned artists uses dance to question identity, culture and the feminine. Together, their work explores emotionally charged subject matter—Jinza Thayer through humor and Simas with intense, patient movement and atmosphere. This event is free and open to the public.

Simas and Jinza Thayer have a long history of directing, presenting and performing each other’s work, and their Carleton appearance marks the end of a 14-city tour by the two acclaimed Twin Cities’ dancers and choreographers.

Simas will perform her critically acclaimed award-winning solo, “We Wait In The Darkness,” a work of displacement and homecoming fueled by the stories of the Seneca women of Simas’ family. The piece is performed within an environment of film, a paper set, and an original surround sound music composition performed by French contemporary music composer François Richomme.

Jinza Thayer will share a work-in-progress performance of “All Hail The Queen,” which celebrates the vagina and humorously pushes against a phallic-centered packaging of the female experience. Both sung and danced, this commentary uses ammunition provided by culture and rams it into a NutriBullet™ blender.

Additional performers include Twin Cities artists Non Edwards, Missa Kes, Sharon Picasso, and Taylor Shevey. Lyrics are by Melissa Birch, and this re-imagined blend is a collaboration with visual artist Amelia Biewald.

Rosy Simas is a Minneapolis-based performer working primarily as a choreographer. Her approach to dance making is multi-faceted: she designs immersive containers for performance using sound, textiles, film, and paper. Simas’ dance work investigates how culture, history, home, and identity are stored in the body and can be expressed in movement. She has created work speaking to a wide range of subject matter, from the Iraq War to her grandmother’s American Indian boarding school. Simas is the recipient of a 2013 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Dance Fellowship and awards from the TIWAHE Foundation and the First People’s Fund, and residencies at the Indigenous Arts Program at Banff Centre, IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, the Oneida Arts Program, and the Talking Stick Festival. Her current work is supported by a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2015 National Presenters Network Creation Fund Award, and a 2016 NEFA National Dance Project Award. More at www.rosysimas.com.

After spend her first six years in Japan and Southeast Asia, Deborah Jinza Thayer grew up in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated from Johns Hopkins University and received an MFA in dance at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Now based in the Twin Cities, she has created over 60 original works and presents her work as Movement Architecture, which explores movement in structured environments. The work strives to create altered metaphorical spaces that request an embodied reflection of both our internal and external worlds. Jinza Thayer is the recipient of a 2004 McKnight Fellowship for Choreography and a 2010 SAGE Award for Choreographic Concept and Design. She has received support from the Minnesota State Arts Board, American Composers Forum, Jerome Foundation, and others. She maintains a one-on-one movement training practice in St. Paul and currently teaches somatics, technique, and composition at Zenon Dance Company and School in Minneapolis. More at www.jinzadances.com.

This event is sponsored by Arts at Carleton. For more information, including disability accommodations, call (507) 222-4389. The Weitz Center for Creativity Theater is located at the corner of Third and College Streets in Northfield.