This Event has Passed
Blurred Bodies
“A concert for the voice and the body”
Friday, August 4, 2023 at 8:30pm
PITTSBURGH, PA (July 10, 2023): Blurred Bodies – A One Night Only performance featuring Attack Theatre and Roomful of Teeth. Blurred Bodies is a concert for the voice and the body. An intertwining landscape of physicality and sound that will move you in new ways. Blurred Bodies brings Grammy®-winning vocal band Roomful of Teeth and Pittsburgh’s world-renowned dance company, Attack Theatre together at Carnegie Mellon University’s Chosky Theater for an evening that expands the expressive potential of vocal music and dance.
This exciting partnership emerges from the 6th International Conference of Dalcroze Studies. Pittsburgh will host this gathering of Dalcroze scholars and practitioners from five continents from August 2-5, 2023. This conference is a global, transdisciplinary forum, open to viewpoints from education, the arts and humanities, and the social, health and life sciences.
Blurred Bodies is a world premiere music and dance immersion into the sounds, minds and breath of ten musicians and six dancers. “The connection between the vocalists and the dancers is the crucial element of this performance.” says Attack Theatre Co-Artistic Director and Choreographer Peter Kope. “We’ve worked with many musical styles in live performance, but this is our first vocal band. Roomful of Teeth brings so much rich, dark, deep and mesmerizing musical storytelling that they fit right into our artistic aesthetic and curiosity.”
Emile Jaques-Dalcroze states that music must be “in the body” in order to be truly felt and relevant. This performance explores the contrasts and intersections between the sound bath experience of the music, and the visceral sensations of the dance.
Dr. Stephen Neely, Chair ICDS6 Organizing Committee and Director of the Marta Sanchez Dalcroze Training Center states, “I wanted to create an opportunity for these world class performers to discover if there are actually any true lines between music and movement. If the lines between hearing and moving are blurred through the body, then the terms “musical” and “music” gain new meaning.”
Dalcroze Eurhythmics explores the relationship between music and movement, emphasizing the role the body has to play in our musical experience.
“It’s been so fabulous to work with Roomful of Teeth and their music on this project. I hope that the audience will feel that same overwhelming feeling of connection” adds Attack Theatre Co-Artistic Director Michele de la Reza.
Neely concludes, “So we ask, how might our mundane interactions be reinterpreted as music? What are the ‘gestures’ of our mundane lives? The answers to these questions have impact for performance studies in music and dance, but also for any fields interested in interaction, experience, or community. How do we design a more beautiful interaction? I hope this performance will further the investigation toward these answers.”
Blurred Bodies
Featuring Attack Theatre and Roomful of Teeth
Date: Friday, August 4, 2023
Performance time: 8:30pm
Location: Philip Chosky Theater (Carnegie Mellon University)
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Ticket Prices:
General Admission: $40
Student/Senior/Artist Admission: $25
For more information and tickets, visit www.attacktheatre.com/blurred-bodies
###
About Roomful of Teeth:
Roomful of Teeth is a Grammy® winning vocal band dedicated to reimagining the expressive potential of the human voice. By engaging collaboratively with artists, thinkers, and community leaders from around the world, the group seeks to uplift and amplify voices old and new while creating and performing meaningful and adventurous music.
Founded in 2009 by Brad Wells, the band was incubated at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in North Adams, Massachusetts, where members studied with some of the world’s top performers and teachers and commissioned composers who were known for breaking molds. They have learned that the boundaries of the human voice are never what they seem, that rules can be bent, and broken, and perhaps they should be.
As the world rapidly changes, Roomful of Teeth is cultivating deeper relationships with technology, continuing to expand the capabilities of the human voice, aiming to be unburdened by physical limitations. They are excited about new collaborative projects that are focused on the stories of place, home, and community in the diverse environments our planet has provided. The group explores these boundaries with passionate curiosity, contagious enthusiasm, and deep gratitude.
Learn more at roomfulofteeth.org
About Attack Theatre:
Attack Theatre has been making critically acclaimed dance for almost thirty years, uniting artists and audiences through the process and production of personal, accessible and collaborative dance-based performance. Attack Theatre combines modern dance, original live music, multimedia and interdisciplinary art forms to present work to diverse audiences in traditional and non-traditional spaces in Pittsburgh, throughout the United States, and around the world.
Rooted in reflection, investigation, and imagination; Attack Theatre’s highly sought-after programs with students and teachers explore the artistic process, enhance curricular concepts, and bring kinesthetic learning into the 21st century educational environment. Attack Theatre's arts in education programs utilize movement and dance to enhance problem solving and critical analysis skills, build interdisciplinary connections, cultivate communication and cooperation skills, engage in abstract thinking, bolster self-confidence and expression, support health and wellness, explore the creative process; and create a deeper understanding of dance as an art form.
Learn more at attacktheatre.com
About the Sixth International Conference of Dalcroze Studies (ICDS6):
ICDS6 aims to present the best of current research and practice within Dalcroze Studies and related fields. ICDS is a global, transdisciplinary forum, open to viewpoints from education, the arts and humanities, and the social, health and life sciences. We welcome practitioners and scholars alike. This year our theme is “Ecologies of Practice in Music and Movement.
ICDS6 welcomes participants to investigate the many ecologies of Dalcroze and related practices – the complex relationships between participants, practices, musics, and social and physical environments. The conference will explore ecological perspectives, seeking to understand vital connections at individual, communal, societal and systemic levels. Participants are invited to consider how Dalcroze and related practices are shaped by technology, climate, natural resources, health issues, economies, social and political bureaucracies, and how we affect and create change in our communities.
Special Addition for ICDS6, the composer, singer, director/choreographer and creator of new opera, music-theater works, films and installations, Meredith Monk will be one of the Keynote Speakers and will lead a workshop with the full conference attendance.
Recognized as one of the most unique and influential artists of our time. Monk creates works that thrive at the intersection of music and movement, image and object, light and sound, discovering and weaving together new modes of perception.
Celebrated internationally, Ms. Monk’s work has been presented at major venues throughout the world...In conjunction with her 50th Season of creating and performing, she was appointed the 2014-15 Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall. Recently Monk received three of the highest honors bestowed to a living artist in the United States: induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2019), the 2017 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize and a 2015 National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama.
