DANCING ON THEIR GLITTERING MIRRORS
DANCING ON THE GLITTERING MIRORS is a piece that combines dance, theater, and visual arts.
Using stories documented from intimate interactions in public spaces as its base, the piece explores the concepts of intimacy and passion, combining reality with fiction, and the extraordinary with the terrestrial.
The work explores the body as a sensory and emotional object in constant transformation. A body in continuous perceptive change that expands time, making each experience grounded in the present.
Narration and conversation are carefully and subtly interwoven with dance movement, giving a nice mix between abstract and objective. The work is non narrative but creates a special world with individual stories. The speech is used less for meaning and instead to create the body and atmosphere.
How does the connectivity among us as humans create intensity and energy in our existence? Concepts such as passion, wildness, and affection are deeply engrained and the ability to allow ourselves to channel those emotions is explored: what rituals can we perform to allow ourselves to be affected by these forces?
Sônia Lopes Soares-Viga212
Sônia Lopes Soares // director, choreographer, performer
Mercedes Searer // performer
Janet Panetta //performer
Charlie Gowin // performer
Jiyoun Chang // lighting designer
Kuki Stolarsky //sound designer
Baille Younkman //costume designer
PHOTOS
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Sônia Lopes Soares
Sônia Lopes Soares is a Brazilian director, choreographer and performer, based in New York City.
Cultivating a language through multidisciplinary collaboration, Soares constructs scenes using nonlinear, poetic narratives, mirroring the random and chaotic nature of the universe. This investigation encompasses vulnerability in the bodies, the line between fiction and reality, the ridiculous and tragic, and how they all interconnect.
Sônia has received four prestigious grants from the city of São Paulo and the British Council to develop, produce, and perform her company’s work. Soares has performed in Brazil, Argentina, Peru, United States, France at Pompidou, and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
In 2017 Sonia created a new work in a four-month residency in Brazil, with a NY based dancer and two Brazilians actors, and in September 2017 she participated in a residency in Groningen Holland with Cia Hiato from São Paulo Brazil.
Sônia has been showing her work at Dixon Place, NDA/Performance Mix Festival and Judson Church at the Movement Research.
Mercedes Searer
Mercedes Searer is a Brooklyn based dancer and choreographer.
As a maker she is interested in the kinetic energy of the object; its rhythm, its allusion to meaning, and the metaphors it presents for life itself. Since arriving in New York in 2009, Mercedes Searer has worked with Elizabeth Streb, Sara Rudner, Twyla Tharp, Peter Kyle, and Jody Oberfelder, among others. She is currently working on Cia Viga212 with Sônia Lopes Soares. While earning her MFA at Sarah Lawrence, Mercedes successfully applied for, and was awarded, five grants to fund her dance productions. Her work has been most notably shown at The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh Children's Museum, and The Jack Hanley Gallery. Mercedes’ artistic practice centers on assumptions around identity. She seeks to invest in the notion that bodies are perpetually engaged in processes of biological, social, and cultural performance.
Janet Panetta
Janet Panetta has danced with American Ballet Theater as well as many modern and post modern dance companies.
She has been called “one of the best performers in fifty years” by Jennifer Dunning of the New York Times. Her international teaching has been acclaimed for four decades, working with companies like Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch and ROSAS/PARTS Brussels, Be. She is the recipient of the Martha Hill Mid Career Achievement Award, and the first dance teacher chosen to give an interview with the Oral History Project at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Deborah Jowitt, Village Voice, has said, “ Panetta always dances like a woman of the world, elegant and slightly sad."
Charles Gowin
Charles Gowin is a performer from Columbia, Missouri.
Gowin received a BFA in Dance from the University of Illinois in the Fall of 2015. Since moving to Brooklyn, he has had the pleasure of dancing for Katy Pyle’s Ballez in Sleeping Beauty and The Beast and Slavic Goddesses, Brendan Fernandes, Juri Onuki and Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and other works by John Bernd with Ishmael Houston-Jones and Miguel Gutierrez.
Jiyoun Chang
Lighting Designer
Collaborated with Sonia Lopes Soares on many shows since 2010; Violetas Murchas, Chaper 2 “The Rooms”, Open House, I’d rather the Ocean, After Tomorrow, Dancing on their glittering mirrors
Robert and Maria with Maria Habassi at St. Mark’s Church and Tanz im August
New York credits; Our Country (Under the Radar, by Annie Saunders&Becca Wolff), Relevant (MCC, directed by Liesl Tommy),Sleep (BAM Next Wave), Too Heavy For Your Pocket, Ugly Lies The Bone (Roundabout), Sojourners, Her Portmanteau (NYTW, Projection & Lighting Design), brownsville (LCT3), Goldberg’s Variation (BAM Next Wave), The World is Round (Ripe Time),The Dance and the Railroad (Signature), T.1912, Peter and the Wolf (Guggenheim). Other credits; An Octoroon, Aubergine(Berkeley Rep), The Parchman Hour (Guthrie); Tokyo Fish Story (The Old Globe), The Unfortunates, Troilus and Cressida (OSF)
OBIE AWARD in Lighting Design. Yale School of Drama.
Jiyounchang.com
Kuki Stolarski
Kuki Stolarski is a Brazilian music producer and drummer. As a drummer, Kuki has recorded and performed with household names such as Seu Jorge, Sandra de Sá, Rita Lee, João Donato, and Zélia Duncan, amongst others.
As a drummer, Kuki is a full time member of the bands Karnak and Funk Como Le Gusta, and is a session musician for singer and composer Zeca Baleiro.
As a producer, Kuki creates soundtracks for theater, dance, and film.
Baille Younkman
Baille Younkman is an artist and designer from Columbus, Ohio. After having studied fashion design and sculpture, Baille received her BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY, making costumes for performance art. It is there that she is able to find an intersection between her interests in three-dimensional form, time, and the abstract narrative. Baille's work has been shown at BRIC arts, Barishnikov Art Center, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, BAM Harvey Theatre, The Irondale Center, VOGUE Italia, The Kitchen, The Chocolate Factory, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, The Walker Arts Center, The Institute of
Contemporary Art Boston, LUMBERYARD Contemporary Performing Arts, and most recently, Abrons Art Center.
Sonia Lopes Soares-Viga212 is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions for the purposes must be made payable to Fractured Atlas and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.