Your Huge Head: "Thirst" Experimental Dance at ADM Project

Your Huge Head: Thirst
ADM Project, Hollywood
17 March 2007

“Thirst,” is the first installment of a choreographic collective. There are five participants in this round. Drawing numbers out of a hat to determine their order, each choreographer directs one rehearsal, adding to or manipulating the material created in the previous rehearsal. The process is choreographic “telephone.”

The purpose is to erase authorship in art and create dance that makes your head swell.


Saturday. March 17th (St. Patrick’s Day) at 8:00 p.m.
General Admission $20
Students and Seniors $15
People Dressed in Head-to-toe Green $10
Atelier Deluxe Musique 6015 Santa Monica Boulevard Hollywood, CA 90038 www.admproject.com

yourHUGEhead invites you to the centrifuge of great dance in LA
To arrange PRESS TICKETS please email Lbitkoff@gmail.com
or call 310.923.2766

LILIAN BARBEITO founded yourHUGEhead and is the co-director of Body Traffic, Los Angeles’s unrivaled contemporary dance company. She is originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she worked with Santa Fe Opera, Southwest Ballet and Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. She graduated from The Juilliard School, where she studied on a four year, full tuition scholarship awarded by Tomorrow’s Leaders of America for her essay about dance and disability. In New York, Lillian worked with Indrani, The Metropolitan Opera, New York City Opera, Zvi Gotheiner, Terrain and The Agnes deMille Project. Since moving to Los Angeles, she has performed with American Repertory Dance Company, Collage Dance Theater, Helios Dance Theater, Onidance, John Malashock and Raiford Rogers . Lillian has taught progressive ballet and modern technique internationally, including Aspen/Santa Fe Ballet, Halifax Dance Theater, Lyon Opera Ballet, Long Beach Ballet, Southland Ballet, UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures and Westside Academy of Dance. She was nominated for outstanding female performance in the 2004 Lester Horton Awards for her work with PTERO Dance Theater. Lillian recently toured with Strange & Elegant Productions for Dom Perignon, Aston Martin, W Hotel New Orleans and the 2006 & 2007 Grammy Awards. Lillian enjoys judging for Celebrity Dance Competitions and is an accomplished free-lance choreographer. Her latest commissions include the awarding winning children’s video “Wheels on the Bus,” two pieces for Festival Ballet Theatre’s concert at the Barclay Theater and solos for the American Grand Prix. Her contemporary work “Wink,” Best Choreography Award at the 2005 Czar Dance Competition and her piece “Precipice,” won 1st Place at the 2007 KAR Competition.

TINA FINKELMAN founded yourHUGEhead and is the co-director of BODY TRAFFIC. She grew up in New York City and attended Barnard College, Columbia University where she performed the works of Martha Graham, Jose Limon, and Paul Taylor and was a featured soloist in the works of Lila York, Ted Thomas, and Aszure Barton. Tina also performed with dance companies including The Notario Dance Company during their season at the Duke Theater and ASH Contemporary at The Jazz Dance World Congress. Upon graduation, Tina joined the ASzURe & Artists Dance Company as a soloist and has performed throughout the United States, including at the renowned Jacob's Pillow and Spoleto Festivals. In Los Angeles, she has danced with Winifred Harris Between Lines Dance Company and the Evolution Dance Company. Tina most recently danced with Mikhail Baryshnikov and his new contemporary dance company, Hell's Kitchen Dance.

ALEXA KERSHNER began her classical dance training under Cynthia Young and Charles and Philip Fuller in
Pasadena,CA. She went on to study other other forms of movement at Purchase College with Neil Greenberg,
Larry Clark, and her classmates of 2002. While at Purchase she had the great opportunity to work with
Shen Wei, becoming a founding member of Shen Wei Dance Arts in 2001. She moved to Los Angeles in 2005 to give
birth to her son, Augustine.

HOLLY ROTHCHILD has a multi-disciplinary background in dance, choreography, music and theater. Her work has been presented at the Athenaeum Theater, the Electric Lodge, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Taliesin North and West, Hammerstein Ballroom, the Blue Rider, Links Hall, Northeastern Illinois University, Cal State University, Northwestern University, University of Anchorage, University of Fairbanks and at many other venues throughout the US. Her work has received critical acclaim for its' startling imagery and movement from such publications as Performing Arts Journal and the Chicago Reader. She has taught many residencies and performance workshops throughout the US to a variety of individuals including those with disabilities. She has worked with senior citizens for a San Francisco performance at the Theater Artaud, at Chicago's Second City - teaching movement for actors, and at a correctional facility in Alaska. She has also worked with teachers on integrating movement and art into their curriculums. She wrote and taught a credited course at the University of Anchorage entitled "Integrating Intellectual and Physical Creativity Across the Curriculum."
ALESIA YOUNG received her earliest dance training at The Performing Arts Center in New Jersey and additional instruction in the studios of New York and throughout Europe, with a brief stay at Amsterdam’s School for New Dance Development. Young has had the privilege of performing in such venues as Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors in New York City; The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles; working with such artists as Dana Tai Soon Burgess, Katie Duck, Liz Lerman, Joseph Mills, David Rousseve, and Maida Withers. She has been awarded several service and arts honors and was most recently nominated for a Lester Horton Dance Award. She has a B. A. in Dance and American Studies from The George Washington University and her M.F.A. in Dance from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures. Alesia is Dance Faculty and Diversity Coordinator at the Windward School in West LA and previously in UCLA’s dance program. She has performed with OniDance and Holly Rothschild’s Strange and Elegant Productions, as well as longstanding companies like Collage Dance Theatre (LA), Trip Dance Theatre(LA), Sakoba Dance Theatre (London/LA) and most recently, Contra-Tiempo, an activist performance ensemble utilizing salsa as its core movement. Her most recent choreography, "Streams of Emergence," created for the Skirball’s Siteworks Series in conjunction with the LA River Reborn photo exhibit taking her into areas she is most passionate about: site specific, multimedia, and community focused. She will continue to dance with the artists that inspire her and pass on her knowledge to aspiring artists through dance education, but her pursuits as Choreographer have reemerged at the forefront with an emphasis on site specific and dance on film work.

About A.D.M. Project

Opened in July 2005 by William Cardoza, ADM PROJECT is on the second floor of a 1930’s former garment factory, across from the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Exhibiting the works of emerging and mid-career artist, challenging the conventions of dance, performance, music, video, literary and visual arts.

An important role of A.D.M. Project is to generate conversation through exhibitions and relate them to current world events and issues. The gallery often takes an interdisciplinary approach to exploring diverse issues such as gender, interpersonal relationships and topics of macro proportions, such as the environment and economics. Exhibitions will be featured and explored on the sister website, http://www.deluxemusique.com.

Through publishing efforts: literary, music, graphic novels and video documentaries the gallery intends to help better one’s understanding of human nature and art itself.

To arrange PRESS TICKETS please email Lbitkoff@gmail.com
or call 310.923.2766

Fore information as well as photographic images, please contact Wiilliam Cardoza at ADM Project at 323.467.7967, or william@admproject.com

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artcritical.com review of Andrew Krasnow

By Tobey Crockett

Andrew Krasnow’s retrospective exhibition, “Of The Flesh: Skin Works 1990-2005” at  ADM Project in Hollywood is an extraordinary exhibition, by almost any standard.  While the show also includes part of an older film depicting the crucifixion, a keepsake box of slides depicting older performances and installations, and some handsome prints, the lion’s share of the work are objects which Krasnow has fashioned from leather he has made from human skin.  Some of the leather is brightly colored and much of it is rendered into a soft cocoa or taupe sort of neutral, a palette not out of place in the pseudo-Zen of today’s contemporary fashion scene. Legally acquired, and also including some of his own skin as is documented in some slides on the side, Krasnow’s use of our oldest material, ourselves, has understandably been a source of consternation over the years.  But taken at face value, there is almost nothing in the materiality of the objects which suggest their unsettling origin, until one begins to look more closely.  It is not a lurid undertaking.  In fact, it is a rather beautiful, painstakingly crafted and well-installed exhibition with an attention to detail and respect for the material that is quite nearly heartbreaking, the show undeniably packing a visceral and emotional punch.

The gallery is divided into an inner room and an outer perimeter by a set of four columns and open panels which enclose the inner sanctum.  While the exterior walls and the perimeter spaces are the typical antiseptic white of a well-lit gallery space, the inner sanctum is moodier, with the nearly neutral colors of the undyed human leather works nearly merging into the natural grain of plywood walls stained a soft walnut-ty brown.  Within this confessional space, Krasnow blends motifs drawn from the Judaic, Buddhist, Christian and Muslim traditions with various everyday objects.  Known for his mechanical objects, Krasnow has here limited himself to just one: a wooden platform dominated by a noisy and Kafka-esque reading machine entitled “Bookmark” (1999). 

“Angel” (2000), the piece which most perfectly encapsulates the ambitions and successes of the show, both transcends and embodies the all too human materiality with which the visitor is inevitably confronted.  What to make of this human flesh, literally tanned,  pieced and sewn into an aspirational representation of a transubstantiation into lighter-than-air spirit?  Modeled on an osprey wing from Audubon, and set into a rectangular ground as if torn from a book, one can not help but admire the subtlety with which the alternating feathers are signaled, the varying palette of taupe and cocoa brown, the rough and smooth sides of the leather creating a play of light that allows for an unsettling realism, as if it were a detailed fossil found in the living rock.  Trailing strands of excess material break the frame on the lower right and allow for a messy spillover into the viewer’s space.  Like indigenous and pioneer hunters and trappers of yore, these dangling ends alert us to the artist’s apparent loathing to waste any of this precious material.  Indeed, many of the objects in the show are made from tiny scraps left over from the larger projects.  In its many aspects, “Angel” is a heady confrontation of material and symbol, craft and technique – a text which viscerally enters our consciousness before we are able to fully process it. 

Other neutrally colored, tanned but not dyed leather pieces which evoke simple, everyday objects include a baseball cap, a pair of strange cowboy boots, a flag, a wallet, a tie.  Mixed in among these is Hamburger” (2000), a small object reminiscent of Rona Pondick’s pink, toothy “Head” (1991) sculptures.  Krasnow’s labial stack is punctuated by the eerie presence of actual human teeth nestled amongst the folds which represent meat and bread, an evocation of vagina dentate that embodies menace, horror and suffering.  As a statement for vegetarianism, few objects could hope to succeed more artfully.

Evoking the Holocaust, but not dwelling upon the tragedy to the exclusion of other acts of genocide taking place either in the past or present, Krasnow’s political and religious critiques are inescapable. The perimeter of the space is filled on one side with two rows of objects, faced off in confrontation with one another like partners at a square dance.  On the one hand, “Parade Flags: Apollo Series” (1992) presents stiffly mounted American flags jutting out from the interior wall, an imperial display of patriotic rigor mortis, the shiny metal backs which support the flags reflecting one another in a regressive salute to the moonwalks of another era.  Opposite, the “Lamp Shade Series” (1992) describes the infamous lampshades of the Holocaust by their absence, presenting only kerosene lamp bases without shades, the only alteration being a brightly colored band of red human leather which echoes the colorful flags en face.

With dozens of carefully constructed objects, the show is extensive, offering serious discourse tucked away in a beautiful and brave gallery across from the “Hollywood Forever” cemetery.  Far from being sensationalist, it is a tender, spiritual show which confronts the viewer with deeply meditated philosophical and aesthetic issues.  The transgression of materials is almost but not quite surpassed by the craftsmanship of its creation, by the artist’s abilities to shape this ever-present and overlooked material into richly challenging ideas and to remind the viewer of the power of art to transform our world.

artcritical.com

Final closing party for Andrew Krasnow exhibit Oct. 27th 2006 - Mar. 3rd 2007

Yes, finally (just kidding!) the Andrew Krasnow: Of the Flesh exhibit closed last night... October 27th - March 3rd!!!
Lillian Bitkoff Barbeito and Hisao Shinagawa both did a performance...Lillian writhed along the floor and Hisao played some folk counter-culture tunes ; -) A sign of things to come - more experimental dance/performance and music music music...

But also "still more to come" from Andrew Krasnow. We will be holding a series of panel discussions starting at USC this Spring our "NON-SALONS." This is part of the "UGLY FLAG" effort.

Oh and CURRENT TV is coming this Wednesday to interview Andrew and film the exhibit.

CURRENT TV

W.