duet/duet
Heather Kravas
June 25, 8pm
June 26, 3pm & 8pm
Studio A3, The Arts Center at Governors Island
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duet/duet is a dance that happens on a field in the sunshine next to another dance that happens inside a room, overlooking a river at sunset. It is a dance created between performers opal ingle, Joey Kipp and Jennifer Kjos, in partnership with choreographer Heather Kravas. One dance contemplates a shape made between two people so that we might also consider the distance between them. The other reflects a line as two people travel and change together. What might a line endure or become? How might people draw nearer to one another? Not quite adhering to presentational expectations, the performance hovers between a drawing and a dance, intended as a vessel to experience the specific temporality of dusk.
duet/duet is born from a larger, ongoing body of work entitled solid objects - a collaborative project created between Kravas and her friend, visual artist Victoria Haven. Begun in 2018, solid objects has evolved into a series of presentations in galleries, and theaters; uniting the forces of dance and drawing to push/pull at the edges of existing architectures and illuminate each physical space and audience as its own transitory charged universe.
Featuring an electro-acoustic score by composer Zeena Parkins, duet/duet offers a dance built from simple shapes and lines and complex - but not necessarily difficult - feelings.
Collaborators
Heather Kravas, choreographer
Jennifer Kjos, performer
opal ingle, performer
Joey Kipp, performer
Victoria Haven, visual art
Zeena Parkins, acoustic score
solid objects (the body of work which encompasses duet/duet) is a co-commission of Walker Art Center/Minneapolis and On the Boards/Seattle. Alongside support from LMCC, solid objects has received funding/support from the Robert Rauschenberg Residency, Oxbow Gallery/Seattle, 4Culture/Seattle, The Ken and Judith Joy Family Foundation and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship Award (Heather Kravas).
Presented with the support of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels.
Since 1995, Heather Kravas has investigated choreographic, improvisation and collaborative practices in contemporary dance to explore the limits of choreography and her artistic abilities. Punk, feminist, precise and extreme, her work is continually built, wrecked and reconstructed to activate curiosity and examine relationships between art, power, agency and desire.
Kravas grew up in Pullman, Washington, homeland of the Nimiipuu (Nez Perce) Tribe and Palus people, where she studied ballet and the experimental theories of Grotowski. Significant to her understanding of dance as a relevant form are the many artists and teachers she has been privileged to study with and/or work beside. Some of these people may not even remember her but their work lives on in Kravas’s body and body of work: Marina Abramovic, Marion Ballester, DD Dorvillier, Neil Greenberg, Dayna Hanson, Victoria Haven, Okkyung Lee, Nina Martin, Antonija Livingstone, Yvonne Meier, Dean Moss, Tere O'Connor, Mary Overlie, Janet Sassoon, Joan Skinner, Stephanie Skura, Deirdre Wilson and Hannah Wiley.
Kravas has received support from numerous organizations including The Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, MapFund, Foundation for Contemporary Art, Doris Duke/Impact. Her choreography has been presented at venues including American Realness, Base, The Chocolate Factory, Danspace Project, Fusebox Festival, The Kitchen, Movement Research, On the Boards, Performance Space New York, Velocity and Walker Art Center as well as internationally in Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Russia and Slovenia.
Heather lives with her partner and two children in Seattle, on the un-ceded ancestral lands of the Coast Salish people, specifically, the Duwamish People.
A devotee of dance ever since its origins, the High Jewelry Maison is today strengthening its commitment to the arts with Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels.
This initiative, guided by the values of creation, transmission and education, is dedicated to supporting artists and institutions in presenting choreographic heritage, while also promoting new productions.
Since autumn of 2020, Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels has forged a number of international partnerships in support of dance companies and institutions.
In addition, events such as the Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival, which took place in London in March of 2022, strengthen these bonds by offering periodic international encounters focused on choreographic performance, combining contemporary repertoires and original creations.
Finally, Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels supports awareness-raising initiatives focused on culture and dance for audiences of every stripe, professionals and amateurs alike.