CDF Salon
Monday, Oct. 11
6:00-8:00 pm
Woman Made Gallery

685 N. Milwaukee Ave. (MAP )

FREEl

Light snacks and beverages will be served - please join the conversation!

To attend on October 11, Please RSVP to chicagodancemakers@gmail.com

INSIDE/OUTSIDE
a conversation with Molly Shanahan, Artistic Director of Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak and Emily Johnson, Artistic Director of Catalyst Dance...

This season, CDF focuses on the concept of "Inside/Outside" and will pair a Chicago based artist with a visiting artist, to create a duo/dialogue.The conversations explore similarities and differences in work style, regional influences, and areas of inspiration and challenge. This season's salon series hopes to offer a comparison of discoveries both locally and nationally regarding best practices for working with communities, within the field, and within our own creative selves.

Be ready for a dynamic conversation, as Molly and Emily explore questions such as:

• How do artists bring their private creativity to a place of public sharing?
• How do communities influence what happens in the studio?
• Are the challenges dance artists face similar in other parts of the country?

Please join CDF for the kick off event to its 2010-2011 Salon series! RSVP to chicagodancemakers@gmail.com

About the Artists:

EMILY JOHNSON, Artistic Director, Catalyst Dance , is a director/choreographer/curator, originally from Alaska and currently based in Minneapolis. Since 1998 she has created work about the experience of sensing AND seeing performance. Her dances often function as installations, engaging audiences within and through a space and environment - sights, sounds, smells - as well as a place's architecture, history, and role in community. She works to blur distinctions between performance and daily life and to create work that reveals and respects multiple perspectives. This allows for the possibility of multiple meanings - with a goal of stimulating reflection and emotional empathy between performer and audience, and between audience members. Her most recent work, The Thank-you Bar is touring through 2011 to the TBA Festival at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, The Dance Center at Columbia College, Northrop Auditorium, DiverseWorks, ODC Theater, Vermont Performance Lab, and Dance Theater Workshop with support from National Dance Projects.

Emily grew up in her native Alaska playing basketball and running long distance. At 18 she left rural life, moved to Minneapolis, and quite by accident, learned to become a choreographer and performer. For the past 16 years, city living has swirled around her, dragging her, literally, away from the physical space of Alaska and family rituals of hunting and fishing, then smoking, drying, canning and freezing food. Emotionally, she is tied to this landscape of South Central Alaska where she was born and to the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta, where her father's family is from. Emily is of Yup'ik descent, though she does not speak the language - yet. She is pulled back, conceptually, when midwesterners and others ask her if she lived in an igloo (myth), if she has an "Eskimo" name (no), and if it is OK to say the word "Eskimo" (only sometimes).

Emily takes her inspiration from the annual migration of salmon, who swim upstream for thousands of miles because they must. She has watched these salmon swim up waterfalls and she believes humans can also be called to do amazing things. She has has made large cast dances for public spaces with people of varied ages, cultures, and physical abilities. She has collaborated with musicians, visual and video artists, sculptors, writers and geothermal scientists to make work born from the joining of creative forces. Recently, someone told her that she makes dance for "the dance-lovers" and she makes dance for "people-who-generally-don't-like-dance." She would like to think that is true; she would like to think that her dances are for every body and that maybe they enlighten small aspects of our existence.

Emily's work has toured across the USA and in Montreal and Russia. She is a 2010 McKnight Fellow and MAP Fund recipient. work includes commissions by the Walker Art Center, Out North, Franconia Sculpture Park, Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts, Red Eye Theater, and Macalester College. She has been presented by Franconia Sculpture Park, Links Hall, Dance Umbrella, the Walker Art Center, ODC Theater, Velocity, and the Southern Theater. She has toured with Scuba and NPN and self-presented in numerous venues including Dance Theater Workshop, Rogue Buddha Art Gallery in Minneapolis, and The Que'Ana Barin Clam Gulch, Alaska. Her dance films have screened at the Walker Art Center, DTW, Chicago Cultural Center and university film festivals. She was a 2009 MANCC choreographer fellow, Loft Native InRoads Fellow and recipient of a 2009 McKnight Choreographer Fellowship, MAP Fund Grant and Seventh Generation Fund Grant. Her past work has been supported by a Forecast Public ArtWorks Grant (2008), Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian Visual and Expressive Arts Grant with Rhianna Yazzie and Carolyn Anderson (2008), MAP grant with Lisa D'Amour and Katie Pearl (2008), Blacklock Nature Sanctuary Residency (2007), Puffin Foundation Grant (2005), Bush Artist Fellowship (2004), Jerome Artist Fellowship (2001, 2002, 2003, 2004), and Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship (2001).

MOLLY SHANAHAN is the Artistic Director of Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak, the Chicago-based company she founded in 1994 to support her research in choreography, performance, and collaboration. Through her career, Molly has developed a distinctively fluid vocabulary with a singular purpose: to find and express the most unbridled of inner impulses. She continues to deepen and hone her singular approach to movement and the body, which feeds her multi-modal collaborations and the public performance of her solo and ensemble dances. Shanahan's "trademark organicism" - equal parts movement laboratory, curiosity think-tank and spiritual practice - proceeds from getting lost in the wilderness of matter, imagery, and psyche, and creating a pathway of memory and relationship to find the way home. Shanahan's recent projects emphasized the capacity to be emotionally and kinetically raw in performance of both improvised and composed dances. The series tapped into the alchemical phenomenon of the audience/performer relationship.

Molly is the recipient of two National Performance Network Creation Fund Awards, a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist Award, and an Illinois Arts Council fellowship for choreography, among others. Her critically-acclaimed evening-length solo My Name is a Blackbird was listed as one of the "top ten dance moments of the decade" by TimeOut Chicago. Shanahan was included in New City's 2010 feature "The Players, 50 people who really perform for Chicago: "discarding the rules of modern dance, Shanahan creates gorgeous organic phrases by observing motion at an atomic level." She is a member of the Dance Program faculty at Northwestern University, teaches at the Lou Conte Dance Studio and conducts workshops and teaching residencies in Chicago and nationally.

CDF/Silverspace Salons are funded in part by the Chicago Seminar on Dance and Performance. Special Thanks to Woman Made Gallery for their partnership for the October CDF Salon.