Presenting world-class, unique performances is part of Ingenuity whether it’s at our annual Festival in September or throughout the year. Combining interactivity, multi-media, site specific, and out of context work, Ingenuity presents a wide range of performance art, dance, theater, music, and more. Past performances have included:
Takes
The Nichole Canuso Dance Company
Open Gallery Hours
A genre bending exploration of dance installation and cinema conceived by choreographer Nichole Canuso and multi-media director Lars Jan. A sensual melding of live bodies and film, TAKES manifests, refracts and spatially unfolds the forgotten moments of a relationship in real time through a panoramic marriage of live choreography and film. Canuso performs alongside Beau Hancock in this panoramic adventure for the senses.
Separate from the performances, the audience is free to wander and shift perspective during the performance as well as during gallery hours. They are invited into the gallery to explore the performance space and interact with the exhibit, creating their own dance within the installation. At scheduled performance times, the two performers enter and the live event unfolds.
Noted by The Philadelphia Inquirer for dances that have “a presence, a right-thereness in the moment like a great slowed down slap stick routine.” Nichole Canuso Dance Company celebrates the awkwardness, humor, and surprise of the human experience. At the crossroads of movement, visual art, and theater, the company’s dances range from a delicate movement trio performed in silence to a multi-floored journey where the performers outnumber the audience. Often set in nontraditional venues transformed into intimate theaters, they incorporate unconventional audience participation and interactive design. The company regularly offers free showings of its work in progress and collaborates with artists from a range of other disciplines, from rock bands to filmmakers. Of the artistic director, The Dance Insider wrote, “Nichole Canuso has a gift for creating movement communities… a gifted choreographer, who makes dancing seem inherently meaningful, social and compelling.”
Go Roadshow
Squonk Opera
East Lakefront
GO Roadshow is “a musical street spectacle on wheels”. This show-making machine is a 34-foot long monster truck retrofitted with truck-horn calliope, a wall made of rotors and a spinning grand piano that is played while it wheels around! Each show starts with a shameless parade of peacock trumpets, spinning drums, accordion, sousaphone, and glockenspiel.
GO is a music and art-mobile – a rolling ruckus that opens up like a mechanical blossom to make the street a vibrant place where people can share a community of the imagination. Night shows include video projected on a rotor screen made of movement itself, and on a blimp that has a mouth that opens in a call to celebration. In GO, Squonk draws from the great American history of traveling circuses, Shriner and holiday parades, medicine shows, and used car lot events that vitalized the heartland of this country.
Squonk Opera created its first show in a Pittsburgh junkyard, with choreographed cranes, roaring earthmovers, and screaming machine shears. Squonk broke onto the scene in 1995 with the Night of The Living Dead: The Opera. The New York Times critic Ben Brantley called their Bigsmorgasbordwunderwerk “ingenious, hallucinatory, hypnotic.” Squonk Opera has since created more than ten original productions and has performed in more than 250 venues across the United States.
Gaming and Gaining
Erica Mott Dance
Dancer / Choreographer Erica Mott collaborates with soundscape designer Ryan Ingebritsen and audio/visual designer John Boesche, a new immersive installation duet inspired by the previous Victory Project Studies seen at Ingenuity 2011. This multimedia performance includes movement responsive video and sound that addresses militarization and relationships that form under it. Combining puppetry, theater, and technological interactivity, this piece creates a dynamic performance space and interactive installation.
Antipodes
Susan Pfeffer, Melissa McNamara and Suzy Grant
Lakefront
A virtual picnic and interdisciplinary theatre event, Antipodes is an interconnected series of moments created by three performers working to navigate the space between technological and natural worlds. A trio comprised of solos, Antipodes began as an attempt at cross-continental communication between artists. SMS (Susan Pfeffer, Melissa McNamara, and Suzy Grant) shared stories, ideas, fears and musings about solitude from locations in New Zealand, Illinois, Connecticut, and Nevada over eight months and sought to conquer loneliness by forging a collaboration through electronic communication.
This performance of Antipodes marks the first time all three collaborators have occupied the same physical space. Ever.
Antipodes received support from University of Nevada, Reno.
Vishtauroborg
Doo Sung Yoo
Vishtauroborg is a robotic multi-performance project that incorporates robotics, electronic music and sounds, dance, and industrial design. Vishtauroborg is a human‑animal-machine hybrid, which combines cow tongues with robotic devices, which are to be mounted on a performing dancerʼ’s chest and back. The hybrid creates real-time interactions harmonized between the machineʼ’s mechanical motions, the human armʼs choreographic gestures, and the robotic tonguesʼ’ computational artificial speech sounds.
Doo Sung Yoo is a new media artist from Seoul, South Korea.
OM Sync – Yoga
Experience the bliss of syncing your breath and movement to live music. Get transported to an infinite time and place. As the tempo of the class picks up, so will the music… eventually the soundscapes you hear will wind down all the way to savasana. Experience OmSync.
OmSync is Stacey & Zack Orr. Stacey is a registered yoga teacher who uses vinyasa “flow” yoga as a form of self-expression and moving meditation. Zack is an innovative musician whose recent album was nominated by the Independent Music Awards (IMAs). Together, they combine the two into a unique experience of movement and music.
Life Illuminated
Joshua Brown, Daniel Tan, Nathaniel Makowski
What happens when biomedical engineers and dancers collaborate? After brainstorming together, our hypothesis was that we could illuminate unseen aspects of human movement and present medical technology in a new light. And so we’ve begun an experiment to determine if such a relationship is feasible and if we can say something about this relationship between art and technology that we couldn’t say before.
Bringing together those of us who specialize in movement and in medical systems, our aim was to enable a previously unseen aspect of movement to be integrated into the performance itself. Performers have sensors placed on their bodies that measure the muscle signals generated when they move. This muscle activity activates and controls lights that cover the body, allowing for a real time visual augmentation of the performer’s movements. What happens when biomedical engineers and dancers collaborate? The preliminary results are here on display. Our theory is that this is pretty cool. We hope you come to the same conclusion.
The Workout Tape
Contemporary video screenings tend to involve passive consumption
of sounds and visuals composed by artists. “The Workout Tape” requires the
audience to get out of their seats and actively respond to the content
they see on screen.
Collaborators on this 25 minute mind & body exercise include:
EverythingIsTerrible, Ben Russell, E Aaron Ross, Jesse Avina, Alyssa Lee Wilmot, George Alley, Stephanie Burke, Jeriah Hildwine, The Happy Collaborationists, Steven Frost, Theodore Darst, James Green, Aaron Orsini, Adam Rux, Mark Sansone, Alfredo Salazar-Caro, Chris Smith, & Dechon Jones.
Mankind: The Rise and Fall
A World Without Windows
We have so much, but know so little… join us for this Grecian tale of creationism. You may appreciate life a little more…
A World Without Windows is a theatre performance group created by Stephen Farkas, Stephanie Wilbert, Katie Wells, and Nate Miller shortly after their graduation from Cleveland State University. Stephen, Stephanie, and Katie have all been a part of projects at Ingenuity in the past. Past projects at Ingenuity include a Two Man Woyzeck in 2009, The Myth of Cleveland in 2010,