Solo Flight: Colin Stetson, Jeanine Durning, and Morgan Thorson, Monday

Milwaukee – What is the initial impulse of creation? What prompts an artist to explore the inner life and share that journey with an audience? Solo Flight is a week-long festival presenting the work of powerful individual voices who share a profound commitment to technique and a fierce desire for ecstatic expression. The juxtaposition of bass saxophonist Colin Stetson (Arcade Fire, Bell Orchestre, Bon Iver), performer and choreographer Jeanine Durning (Alpert Award for Choreography), and dancer/choreographer Morgan Thorson (US Artist Fellow) within one week at four different venues (including a panel discussion between the three moderated by Sara Krajewski, Director of UW-Milwaukee’s INOVA (Institute of Visual Arts) is a singular pass into the euphoric reaches of inner space.

Solo Flight is a week-long festival taking place at venues all over Milwaukee:

• Monday, 4/14/2014. 5:30 PM – Solo Fest Opening Party at Institute of Visual Arts (INOVA) 2155 N. Prospect Avenue., Milwaukee, WI 53202 FREE RSVP to boxoffice@alverno.edu or call at 414.382.6044
• Wednesday, 4/16/2014, 7:30 PM – Jeanine Durning, “inging,” in the Gallery at Lynden Sculpture Garden 2145 W. Brown Deer Rd. , Milwaukee, WI 53217 $20.00
• Thursday, 4/17/2014, 7:30 PM – Morgan Thorson “Journeyman” at INOVA $20.00
• Friday, 4/18/2014, 7:30 PM – Jeanine Durning, “inging,” in the Gallery at  Lynden Sculpture Garden $20.00
• Saturday, 4/19/2014, 10:30 AM- 12:00 PM – Panel discussion with Morgan Thorson, Jeanine Durning, and Colin Stetson, moderated by Sara Krajewski, MIAD’s Todd Wehr Auditorium. 273 E. Erie St., Milwaukee, WI 53202 FREE RSVP to boxoffice@alverno.edu or call at 414.382.6044
• Saturday, 4/19/2014, 8:00 PM – Colin Stetson at Wehr Hall, Alverno College 4100 W. Morgan Ave., Milwaukee, WI 53215 $25.00

A discount off single ticket prices when purchasing tickets to all three events is available for $55.00.  Tickets may be purchased through the Alverno Presents Box Office at 414-382-6044 or on-line at http://alvernopresents.alverno.edu

Artist bios, video clips and links to artist’s web sites are available at http://alvernopresents.alverno.edu/store/product/solo-flight. Artist jpegs may be downloaded at http://alvernopresents.alverno.edu/media, photo credits are listed under images.

Colin Stetson is a bass saxophone player and touring member of Arcade Fire, Bell Orchestre and Bon Iver. In addition to saxophone, he plays clarinet, bass clarinet, French horn, flute, and cornet.

Stetson has performed and recorded with dozens of artists, including Tom Waits, Arcade Fire, TV on the Radio, Feist, Bon Iver, My Brightest Diamond, Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Jolie Holland, Sinéad O’Connor, LCD Soundsystem, The National, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Angelique Kidjo, Kevin Devine, Beanie Burnett, and Anthony Braxton.

He established himself as an intensely original solo composer and performer in 2011 with the release of the widely acclaimed New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges.  Judges ended up on countless year-end lists and emphatically proved that Stetson’s approach to solo saxophone transcends niche or genre; a unique and emotionally resonant instrumental music with influences as wide-ranging as jazz, metal, pop, soul, drone, industrial, minimalism, electro-acoustic and modern contemporary. Remarkably, Stetson channels these manifold musical strains into a singularly identifiable and personal sound as a polyphonic soloist who doesn’t rely on looping/layering or multi-track/overdubs technologies. Anyone who has seen Stetson in solo performance can attest to the stunning physicality of his circular-breathing technique and capacity to produce a seemingly impossible palate of multiple voicings simultaneously in real time – making his already beautiful and evocative compositions all the more enrapturing and viscerally human.

Jeanine Durning is a choreographer and performer from New York City. Durning began performing her solo works in 1998 with “Wishbone.” Since 2002, she has created 15 original works, commissioned by companies and independent performers. In 2008, Durning was the recipient of The Alpert Award for Choreography. She has also had the great pleasure to work and perform on a project basis with Susan Rethorst, Chris Yon, Bebe Miller, Martha Clarke and Deborah Hay, among many other dance luminaries.

Solo Fest will present Jeanine’s current solo performance experiment, inging.  inging was first presented in June 2010 at the Frascati Theater WG in Amsterdam and has since
been invited to theaters, studios, museums and galleries in Berlin, Amsterdam, Leuven (BE),
Chambersburg (PA), and Minneapolis (MN).

inging refers to the suffix “ing” in the English language. “ing” is used to express actions that are
still in progress, that haven’t yet ended. Part spoken word performance, part reverie, part dance, part oral biography, inging is a choreography of the mind, moving in the continuous present. It tracks the velocity of thought through a cascade of non-stop speaking. inging proposes the insistent practice of unscripted language as performance, where speaker is in direct relation with listener at the moment of articulation. Both performer and audience are in perpetual disequilibrium, confronted with the limits of language as a means of communication and understanding. Moving thought through speech, and speechifying thought through movement, the body and its gesture emerge as the inevitable bridge between thought and language.  Channeling parallel states of awareness into a continuous present, each performance simultaneously produces, accumulates and archives itself.

Durning will be in residency at Lynden Sculpture Garden for one week, working with students from MIAD and UWM, as well as the public performances of “inging”

Tickets for “inging” are VERY limited for each performance.

Morgan Thorson’s choreography is driven by a persistent need to investigate culturally, socially and perceptually relevant life experience, and is deepened by her continued study of dance as a purveyor of the same.

Minneapolis-based, 2011 Guggenheim fellowship and award-winning choreographer Morgan Thorson’s new work, Journeyman, is a two-phase project that mediates conversation, the solo dance form, and the nomadic life of the dancemaker.  Alverno Presents will present the first phase of “Journeyman” as part of Solo Fest in which a workshop/party and one-on-one discussions are crafted into solo dance missives.  Composed like a letter, these dances make legible the semantic and sensory elements of the conversation.

The first performance of Thorsons’ solo will be a private performance for one of the people she meets at the party who inspired this specific iteration of Journeyman. (In the second phase of Journeyman, notation of these encounters, including video documentation by Megan Fraser and written description by Christina Schmid becomes a “score” for translating the solo dances into a staged ensemble dance, with the work created at Solo Fest becoming a part of the larger ensemble work.)This private performance will be performed for the general public on April 17^th.

Tickets for the Morgan Thorson solo performance are limited.

Sponsors

Pepsi, Transfer Pizzeria Café, Via Downer, Lightburn, Wisconsin Arts Board

Media Sponsors are 88nine Radio Milwaukee, WMSE

Alverno Presents 

Alverno Presents, the performing arts series of Alverno College, is celebrating its 54^th year.  The series has innovated beyond our history as the longest running, continuous arts presenter in the city, to our niche of presenting contemporary dance, world music and jazz and an array of performance events. Alverno Presents shares the school’s mission by ensuring broad access to and participation in learning, experiencing and developing the arts for the learning community of Alverno, and our community as a whole.  For more information on Alverno Presents, special projects, media reviews and more, visit alvernopresents.alverno.edu, contact Alverno Presents Assistant Director at 414-382-6151, or e-mail rory.trainor@alverno.edu.

NOTE: This press release was submitted to Urban Milwaukee and was not written by an Urban Milwaukee writer. It has not been verified for its accuracy or completeness.

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