Leyya Mona Tawil, Born Livonia, MI, 1975 / BDA University of Michigan, MFA Mills College, Oakland, CA 

Mike Khoury, Born Mt Pleasant, MI, 1969 / BA(Econ) University of Michigan, MA Central Michigan University, MA Michigan State University / Lives in Northville, MI

On a sparse stage, a woman’s body rolls sideways, spinning about its central axis, ricocheting from one edge of the space to the other, back and forth, sometimes at alarming speeds and almost crashing into the audience, other times slowing down, exhausted. In comparison to the familiar, childlike, head-over-heels rolling, this movement seems alien and serious. The woman is clad in a stylishly cut, army-green, hooded raincoat and wears black boots that periodically land solidly but awkwardly on the floor, searching in vain for a physically sustainable way to continue the body’s rotation. Elsewhere on the stage, a black-clad musician holding a viola alternates between periods of repeated, siren-like glissandos and silence. There is a palpable push-and-pull between dancer and musician, but who is pushing and who is pulling is hard to say at any moment in this uncompromising performance.

Born Farmington Hills, MI, 1987 / BS, Wayne State University / Lives in Detroit

“What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one…”

-Federico Fellini

Movement artist Rachael Harbert can be found dancing in that space between the lived and the dreamed. Propelled by nature, relationships, and other earthly things, she works in extremes that point to absurdities within the norm. Exaggerated gestures and surrealist imagery leap out from within her creations. Harbert’s body of work includes site-specific performances, installations, and stage presentations. Each confronts the viewer with urgent meditations on the human condition, and breathes into being the otherwise invisible, intangible, unsociable psyche.

Born 1986, Saginaw, MI/ BFA University of Michigan; MFA University of Iowa/ Lives in Highland Park, MI

Jennifer Harge is a student of the body — the black body, to be exact.

She lives to make them move, play, and most of all to speak; yes, speak, truth to hard social traumas and silent terror. And  do not for a second misread Harge’s intention or vision of dance as an invitation to be entertained. In fact, keep your applause. This dancer turned movement artist, choreographer and educator, is after more – your mind.

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Born Ithaca, New York, 1987 / BS, Skidmore College; MFA, University of Kansas / Lives in Detroit

Eli Gold’s conceptual performances explore the value of labor in art by using the artist’s own body as medium, material, and live-tested instrument. To consider art as a form of labor places emphasis on measures of time and physical effort, and on the demonstration of the processes by which a work of art is made. In addition, Gold’s work exposes how gestures of doing are inextricably intertwined with gestures of feeling, as his practice foregrounds how institutions such as art galleries regulate human behavior. The conceptual approach to performance art in Gold’s work also makes intellectual labor significant, as an a priori plan prefigures each task-based event—whose execution is an ultimately perfunctory affair.

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Liza Bielby, Born Flint, MI, 1980 / BA Kalamazoo College, MI; MFA Dell’ Arte International, CA / Lives in Detroit

Richard Newman, Born London, England, 1980 / BA Greensboro College, NC / Lives in Detroit

It’s 1970. The sixties are over, but not yet past. In a townhouse in New York’s Greenwich Village two members of revolutionary leftist group The Weather Underground are building a pipe bomb packed with nails and dynamite. They plan to use it to “bring the war home” to a dance for non-commissioned officers and their dates at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Casualties are inevitable. A third member of the cell is hammering out an accompanying statement on a typewriter, maniacally searching for inspiration in lines from Sophocles’ Antigone—a play whose message of non-conformity in war-time has achieved renewed currency in the Vietnam protest era. The book he reads from is not just any version of the play, but one by the legendary New York-based anarcho-pacifist ensemble The Living Theater—which is in turn a translation of a version by Bertolt Brecht. At that moment, the twin radical undercurrents of theater and far-left politics converge. Then the bomb explodes. So ends a pivotal scene in The Hinterlands’ kaleidoscopic 2016 art/theater project The Radicalization Process. Continue reading →

Born Sebastopol, CA, 1976 / BA, University of California Santa Cruz; MA & PhD (Performance Studies), New York University / Lives in Detroit

On a sunny Sunday afternoon last July, several hundred people crowded the Dequindre Cut, a popular recreation path in Detroit, to watch a dance. The performance, one of three public dance labs programmed to accompany “Here Hear,” the Cranbrook Art Museum’s celebrated exhibition of Nick Cave soundsuits, included music by Frank Pahl and choreography by Biba Bell. There is no telling what, exactly, the audience expected. What they witnessed was a distributed dance, a de-centered performance event, in which any vantage point along the Cut’s long, linear footprint offered a different view of different groups of dancers, some of whom slinked by in sinuous silence, while others posed, elegant and remote, above the crowd. Others danced a mannered duet involving the ritualistic exchange of their black or white soundsuit costumes, and the rest, by the end, were dancing in furious, ecstatic unison. When all was said and done, no one present had seen a complete dance, or the same dance. Everyone, however, had seen a dance by Biba Bell, an artist who specializes in the unexpected.

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