Charlotte Street Foundation

Premiering Friday, October 22, 8:30 pm and recurring nightly at 8:30pm through Monday, October 25 at la Esquina, 1000 West 25th Street, SEE SAW is an installation-based performance (or a performance-based installation) created by director/composer/musician/performer Mark Southerland, and choreographer/dancer Jane Gotch. Co-collaborators and performers, in addition to Southerland and Gotch, include Shay Estes, Tuesday Faust, Shawn Hansen, Mike Stover, and Matt Tady.

The piece will last approximately one hour and fifteen minutes. Doors open at 8pm each night. Admission is $15/$10 for students and seniors. Note, seating is limited – first come, first served.

Through movement, sound, and installation, SEE SAW will examine the moments when the body meets the mind—self realization, personal epiphanies, and modern coming-of-age stories. Told using an array of tools – often elaborate and abstract; other-times pointedly simple and straight forward – this tale involves a large seesaw and a “trophy playground,” from which music and movement will evolve. Situated in-the-round, the audience itself will become part of the installation and actively engaged in the event.

Read full press release.

Read KC Metropolis Review.

Read University News Review.

On Friday October 15, Urban Culture Project hosts Open Studios at its three UCP Studio Residency Program facilities, which are currently providing free studios to 32 visual and performing artists and groups.  This fall UCP is taking Open Studios to a new level, with MORE studio spaces, MORE artists, MORE activities including live performances, and GUIDED TOURS leaving from Paragraph gallery, 23 East 12th Street, at 6:30 and 8pm.  Maps of the studios will be available at Paragraph, sign boards will be placed at each studio building, and hosts at each location will guide visitors up to the studios.

OPEN STUDIOS OCTOBER 15 FEATURES:
PARTNERSHIP PLACE, 906 GRAND, 13TH FLOOR -  featuring Visual Artists Erika Lynn Hansen, Cory Imig, Paul Smith, Nicholas Naughton, David Carlisle, Julie Malen and Luke Rocha.

NEW STUDIOS AT TOWN PAVILION, 1100 WALNUT, 6TH FLOOR – featuring Visual Artists Brandon Barr, Diane Burchett, Erin Hinz, Katherine O’Hara, David Rhoads, Phil Shafer, Russell Shoemaker, and Jeff Tackett.

CITY CENTER SQUARE, 1100 MAIN, 5TH FLOOR – featuring  Performing Artists Susan Rieger (940 Dance Company), Leralee Whittle,  Jane Gotch, Maura Michelle Garcia, and Black House Improvisors’ Collective; and Visual Artists Terry Campbell, John Carroll Davis, Christina Dostaler, Abbe Findley, John Hilger,  Misha Kligman, Carmen Moreno, Natalie Poserina, Sean Starowitz, Cheryl Toh, Anthony Baab, Clayton Skidmore, Frank Norfleet.

LIVE PERFORMANCES + SPECIAL ACTIVITIES AT CITY CENTER SQUARE:

6:45pm – Jane Gotch will present a preview of her upcoming SEE SAW performance (running October 22-25 at la Esquina and co-created with Mark Southerland.)

7:30pm – 940 Dance Company will perform an improvisation and new works in progress.

8:15pm – Leralee Whittle and Paul Sprawl share excerpts from WorkArtOut, improvise new work, and share videos, dances and songs from their repertoires.

All evening: visual artist Sean Starowitz debuts The Office, a site-specific alternative studio at City Center Square, featuring the curatorial project co-workers, bosses, and supervisors: a design show.

+ other special events at Town Pavilion + pARTnership Place to be announced.

For more about UCP’s current studio residents: Performing Artist Residents; Visual Artist Residents.

Read Third Friday Art Downtown press release with more info about Open Studios + other UCP events on October 15.

Charlotte Street Foundation is pleased to announce the 2010 Charlotte Street Generative Performing Artist Awards Event on Monday, October 11, 8pm at Johnson County Community College’s Polksy Theatre, 12345 College Boulevard, Overland Park, KS.

Free and open to the public, the event will include live performances featuring  the work of actor/creator/writer/singer/songwriter/musician/teacher Stephanie Roberts and composer/musician Brad Cox, who received unrestricted cash awards of $6500 each from Charlotte Street Foundation earlier this year.

Stephanie Roberts’ presentation  will present a short segment of her one-woman film-noir mask play, The Mask of the Broken Heart,  as well as a new theatrical clown piece devised by herself, Matt Weiss and fellow Dell’Arte grad, Gulshirin Dubash.  Brad Cox’s presentation will feature new compositions, structured improvisations, and excerpts from a larger work, “I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream,” written originally for Owen/Cox Dance Group. Performing will be a nonet featuring Rich Wheeler (tenor saxophone), Matt Otto (tenor saxophone), Jeff Harshbarger (bass), Gerald Spaits (bass), Scotty McBee (drums), Kent Burnham (drums), Sam Wisman (percussion and samples), Patrick Alonzo Conway (percussion and baritone saxophone), and Brad Cox (rhodes).  The performance will conclude with a collaborative piece involving both artists and several of their colleagues.

Through its Awards to Generative Performing Artist and Visual Artist programs, CSF seeks to contribute to the vitality of Kansas City’s art community and to enhance Kansas City’s desirability as a place for artists to work and live. Since 1997, the Charlotte Street Foundation has now recognized 78 Kansas City based artists with unrestricted cash Charlotte Street Awards, with a total of $490,500 in unrestricted cash grants distributed directly to artists.

Read full press release.

Read The Kansas City Star review

View photos from the event

Kansas City Electronic Music and Arts Alliance (KcEMA) opens its Fourth Season with electro<>acústico, a concert featuring clarinetist Mauricio Salguero. The concert is Saturday, October 2, 8pm at la Esquina, 1000 West 25th Street. Doors open at 7:30pm; admission is $10/$5 students. Salguero, an old friend of KcEMA, has interacted considerably with their members in the past years; Electro<>acústico is the result of that collaboration.

Salguero will present world premieres of pieces written specifically for him by composers Rodolfo Acosta, Andrew Cole, Jason Bolte and Eric Honour plus pieces by Jorge Sosa and Mark Snyder. The program combines a cutting edge mix of video, electronic sounds and high tech with the emotional intensity and technical dexterity of Mauricio’s playing. Guest artist Rebecca Ashe will join Mauricio on flute performing Asha Srinivasan´s Bapu; an exciting piece based on Indian traditional music.

Read full press release.

Live Streaming by Ustream.TV

In the four-day performance Kill to Hunt, Hunt to Kill, Kansas City-based artist and UCP Studio Resident Jason Dixon dares to call all artists liars and unveils the truth for the first time in art history through a monumental work entitled “The Truth.” A live performance and webcast from La Esquina / 1000 W 25th Street, Kansas City, MO 64108 at 8pm on Friday, August 20 (also live streaming at www.ustream.tv/channel/kill-to-hunt-hunt-to-kill)  begins this journey as “The Truth” is stretched in the gallery through absurd presentations and playful theatrics.

The event on August 20 will culminate in a tribal celebration and performance from musician/composer Hunter Long, following which the artist will take to the isolated woods of Missouri for three days with no food, shelter or basic amenities on an actual hunt using only tools formed from “The Truth” in an effort to salvage its namesake.  Photographer Josh Ferdinand will document this part of the performance only until his camera runs out of memory.

Finally, on August 24, 2010, 7pm, guests should bring their appetites as Dixon returns to La Esquina straight from the woods for a BBQ and potluck to share his kills, stories, and experiences from the hunt. Guests who don’t believe in the artist’s hunting prowess are welcome to bring their own food, and even feed the artist.

Read full press release.

As part of Third Friday Art Downtown June 18, UCP presents Event Horizons, a touring program of new work by film, video, and new media artists Thomas Comerford (Chicago), and Sabine Gruffat & Bill Brown (Madison, Wisconsin), at Project Space, 21 East 12th Street, 8pm (suggested donation, $5). The event will run approximately 2 hours.

This program includes a screening of Comerford’s The Indian Boundary Line, which follows a road in Chicago, Rogers Avenue, that traces the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis boundary between the United States and “Indian Territory.” In doing so, it examines the collision between the vernacular landscape and the symbolic one, and suggests how this land and its history are an index for the shifting inhabitants, relationships, boundaries and ideas of landscape — as well as the consequences — which have accompanied the transformation of the “New World.”

Also featured is Gruffat & Brown’s Time Machine, a multimedia live performance in which the artists explore new way of telling stories with technologies that are both cutting edge and obsolete, including slide projector, analog video switcher, record player, digital video projector, and computer.  During the performance, the stage becomes the control panel for an immense ship and the projection screen a window through which different spaces and times are visualized, as Gruffat and Brown assume the role of space-time tourists driven by an exploratory urge.

Read full press release.

Voices of Community + Loneliness, on Saturday, May 22, 1pm at Paragraph, 23 East 12th Street, features writers and performers responding to Paragraph exhibition’s themes. The program, free and open to the public, features Gina Kaufmann’s “Status Report,” for which Ron Megee, Rita Brinkerhoff and Kaufmann will stand on soap boxes, shouting real Facebook status updates onto the street to greet visitors. By adapting online behavior to a physical space, visitors will get to see the humor, loneliness and occasional beauty of broadcasting unrelated sentiments into a shared void. Concluding “Status Report,” Pitch Managing Editor Scott Wilson will speak about how people behave differently in the dark. The program also features a presentation of poetry inspired by the exhibition theme and organized by Glenn North, Poet-in-Residence at the American Jazz Museum. Featured poets are North, Robert Brown, Taylor Brown, and Camiel J. Irving.

The evening of May 22, at 8pm at The Brick, 1727 Megee, Gina Kaufmann hosts Storytelling: Community + Loneliness, a night of stories about the unexpected ways in which feelings of loneliness and feelings of belonging can intersect.  Storytellers featured include Rolf Potts, Kaite Mediatore Stover, Beth Byrd-Lonski,  Frankie Krainz, Meshel Cook, Hadley Johnson, and Brian Busby.

On Saturday, May 8, 7:30 pm at la Esquina, 1000 West 25th Street, BD Collier, Founder and President of The Society for a Re-Natural Environment, will give a multi-media presentation titled, “On the Impact of Flying Carp.” The presentation, free and open to the public, will address the natural history of invasive Asian carp, their impact on North American waterways, and possible solutions to the problem. The presentation will focus primarily on the silver or flying carp whose population has been rapidly expanding in mid-western waterways since the 1980′s and the threat they pose to the Great Lakes ecosystem.

BD Collier is a re-naturalist, educator and artist. As Founder and President of the Society for a Re-Natural Environment he gives presentations, creates exhibitions, and engages in sanctioned and unsanctioned public works to increase understanding of and connection to the non-human natural world. He also works to educate people about how humans have shaped the ecosystems they live in. Collier  has exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad including: Neues Museum Weserberg Bremen, in Germany; Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art; Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales, Havana, Cuba; University of Houston; 60 Wall Gallery, Deutsche Bank NYC; University of Kansas Natural History Museum and Paragraph Gallery in Kansas City, MO. Collier’s work has been written about in numerous publications including: Art in America, The New York Times, Afterimage, Orion: Nature, Culture, Place, Domus, and Art Papers Magazine. He earned his MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He currently lives and works in Bloomington, IL.

For more about Collier and the The Society for a Re-Natural Environment, visit http://societyrne.net/

Uncover the hilarious secret subtext of your favorite Saturday morning cartoon February 11 to March 7 in the Coterie At Night production of Spooky Dog: A Scooby-Doo-Like Mystery (Plagiarized, improvised and not for kiddies!), directed by CSF Generative Performing Award Fellow Ron Megee and performed evenings-only at la Esquina, 1000 W. 25th St. (On First Friday February 5, 6-8pm, the public is invited to a FREE sneak peak and party with the Mystery Gang. Meet the visual and performing artists and enjoy Spooky Dog’s favorite snacks and beverages. Rah Booty perform as special guests.)

The production, true to the Hanna-Barbera time period of the late ‘60s-early ‘70s, incorporates musical numbers, improvisation, and audience participation as it chronicles the uproarious and campy adventures of a dog detective named Spooky, his spaced-out hippie friend, and their gang. The teen-age mystery gang confronts criminals, but what do they do about their own burgeoning sexual desires? Or those tasty dog treats with unexpected side effects?  Or the penchant they suddenly have for busting a move?  This Coterie At Night production is PG-13 for language and sexual innuendo. Individuals under the age of 13 will not be admitted.  Spooky Dog is a co-production with the Coterie and UMKC Theatre’s professional training program.

Tickets  are $12 for all ages; $9 for Coterie season ticket holders. Discount Deal: 10 tix for $10 each – advance phone orders only. Tickets may be purchased by calling (816) 474-6552, online at www.coterietheatre.org, at the Coterie Box Office in Crown Center, or at the door 30 minutes prior to performance time. Read full press release. Watch YouTube clip. Read Kansas City Star review.

Cumulus, a multi-media, multi-disciplinary exhibition featuring select projects developed by current UCP Studio Residents, continues with the addition of new artworks and projects. New features debuting at the Third Friday opening on February 19, 6-9 pm at Paragraph, 23 E. 12th. include The Wizard Ningxt, an eccentric character embodied by Aaron Storck, who will offer stir-fry, drinks, and poetry to gallery visitors from temporary housing structure at the gallery’s entrance, and a rotating exhibition curated by Erica Mahinay within Paragraph featuring works by Storck, Caleb Taylor, Samantha Persons, Lori Yonley, Kat Dison, Luke Rocha, Darwin Arevalo, Erica Mahinay, Charlie Mylie and Timothy Amundson.

In nearby Oppenstein Park, 12th and Walnut, Elaina Wendt Michalski will debut Exit, composed of two life-size figure sculptures, based on homeless youth. Made of unfired clay, these figures, left vulnerable to the elements, are inspired and informed by Michalski’s interaction with members of Synergy Services, a youth homeless shelter in the Kansas City area.  In addition Lori Yonley will welcome visitors once again to Give and Take, an ever-revolving collection of 5×5 collaborative drawings, and on the street Kurt Flecksing and Sean M. Starowitz will again fire up the S’mores Vending Cart, supplying a taste of campfire nostalgia and accumulating funds to award to future artists’ projects.

Additional Cumulus Events:
Saturday, February 20th, 1-2:30pm: Critique dialogue led by Barbara O’Brien, Curator, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Julie Farstad, Painting Professor, Kansas City Art Institute.
Wednesday, February 24, starts at 6pm: Potluck Drawing session, Reperformance organized by Charlie Mylie (7pm), & The Four Seasons, a performance collabioration by Jane Gotch, Tim Amundson, Erica Mahinay.

Read full press release. Read Kansas City Star review. Read KC Free Press article.

See Fox4-TV interview with Elaina Wendt Michalski.