Tahni Holt, Linda Austin, Kathleen Keogh on IN SITE by Karl Burkheimer

THREE PERFORMANCES
THREE WEEKENDS IN MARCH
AT DISJECTA 8371 N Interstate. Portland, Oregon
ON KARL BURKHEIMER’S IN SITE

3/5 1pm – 2pm
Tahni Holt with Richard Decker, Sally Garrido-Spencer, Noelle Stiles and Robert Tyree. Sound by Tom Thorson

3/12 1pm – 2pm
Kathleen Keogh

3/19 1pm – 2pm
Linda Austin with Jin Camou, Keyon Gaskin, Danielle Ross. Sound by Seth Nehil
…
Karl Burkheimer’s sculptural installation will essentially occupy Disjecta’s entire cavernous 3500 square foot gallery space. Its sheer size would leave little room for an audience, however In Site addresses the nature of experience by becoming the very ground one walks upon. The explicit functions of the gallery, of artwork even, are turned inside out as the piece becomes the environment without adhering to doctrines of performance or purpose. In Site takes the form of a giant, planked walkway, a ramp, a barrier, yet the work suggests an unknown or esoteric use and results in an object that challenges associations and expectations of image, object, and architecture. The haptic experience of the viewer will ultimately complete the piece.

http://www.disjecta.org/events/kburkheimer.php

Tahni Holt, Kathleen Keogh and Linda Austin have been invited to curate a series of Saturday performances at Disjecta from 1:00-2:00pm throughout the duration of Karl Burkheimer’s sculptural installation: March 5th (Tahni Holt), March 12th (Kathleen Keogh), March 19th (Linda Austin). They have been asked to respond to the altered space through an improvisational form. In this context curation is used as a framework for each of the artists to individually strategize and activate exactly what ‘respond’ means and to what they are responding. It also gives them autonomy to invite other performers and musicians to join them. As individual artists they have all worked in site specificity as means of producing information and, from the performer’s and viewer’s point of view, have used their bodies with place to construct different ways of seeing. In these Saturday performances nothing is taken for granted. A shift in the ordinary changes all relations. Shifting the ordinary does not inherently mean extraordinary but there is great potential.

BIOS:
Linda Austin, co-founder & director of Performance Works NorthWest in Portland, OR, has been making dance and performance for over two decades. Her poetic, unconventional, rigorously conceived works have been performed in New York, Mexico, and the Pacific Northwest supported by numerous fellowships, grants and residencies. In her role as director of Performance Works, Austin has presented innovative work by hundreds of dance, theater, music, performance and media artists from the Northwest and around the country.
Recent projects include the 2010 Paired Spectacular, an homage to dance pioneers Yvonne Rainer and Deborah Hay, and the 2009 Bandage a Knife, a collaboration with Seth Nehil inspired by a Japanese cult noir film.. Austin is currently working on A head of time, a new evening length work for 9 performers and 300 blankets that churns up movement, sound, video, and text in its probing of internal and external time in its relation to lived and imagined experience.. The first iteration of this project will be featured at The Art Gym in April 2011 as part of Dance: Before, After, During.

Kathleen Keogh has been making experimental dance, theater and music-based performances in Portland since 1999 as a solo artist and in groups such as Woolly Mammoth Comes to Dinner, GDP, $kull$ and Super Unity. She has performed and/or taught at TBA, Bumbershoot, Performática Festival (in Puebla, MX), Seattle Festival for Dance Improvisation (SFDI), Seattle Improvised Music Festival, and Olympia Festival for Experimental Music. Lately she has been learning the beginning basics of Body Mind Centering and Alexander Technique, from Wendy Hambidge and Rebecca Harrison, respectively.

Much of Tahni Holt’s work is created with collaborators and contributors. She collaborates with other performance makers and video artists and musicians and architects and visual artists and object makers. She is interested in the space these dialogues create. Moments of choreography are everywhere, choreography as the map of ideas exchanged back and forth and how those ideas land and take shape in our bodies.

Her work has been seen at On The Boards and Bumbershoot in Seattle and PICA’s International TBA Festival. As well as far off places in France, Idaho, Austin, TX. and Atlanta GA. She has worked with Dance Luminary Deborah Hay and most recently spent time in Europe where she performed in Vienna through Eszter Salamon and Christine De Smedt in TRANSFORMERS. She was curated into PORTLAND 2010 and will be presented through The Art Gym in April 2011 as part of Dance: Before, After, During. For the next two months she will be busy with the makings of a newspaper about dance making and performing. Tahni will be traveling to Greece this June to continue work with The Gravediggers, an on-going collaboration with Elizabeth Ward (NY). www.tahniholt.com