http://www.riting.org/post/173707854679/body-bags-by-jmy-james-kidd
A Performance by Jmy James Kidd with Perin Hailey McNelis and Tara Jane O’Neil
April 12 & 13, 8:30pm
$5-10 donation
Body Bag or Body Bags (Not Very Good Working Titles) is a piece I have been designing with the idea of performing it with 20 – 30 dancers. The dancing that has been coming through my body contains a lot of sliding and slithering on the floor, sometimes coming up a little off the ground to locomote as a pentapedal creature and sometimes wildly bounding and twirling up through the air. I have been refraining from watching or doing forms of dance that I was trained in – namely ballet, cunningham or release technique – as I search for a lesser known, more subjective, more purely female expressive vocabulary. With this dance Tara Jane O’Neil plays effect manipulated solo bass very low and beautiful with some slides and some melodies, staying in a very very low tone that gets felt in ones bones.
I am so thankful to Perin for dancing with me during this research time at PAM residencies and thank you to Brian Getnick for creating the wonderful space to work in.
At the moment I am inspired by the work of designer and architect India Mahdavi, the painter, textile, costume and set designer Sonia Delaunay and the healer and artist Emma Kunz.
There will be James Kidd outfits, Dana Penenberg candles and more for sale before and after the shows.
Jmy James Kidd (b. San Francisco, CA) designs dances and clothing and makes watercolors. Her dance history includes ballet and RUG Cunningham technique. Over the last decade she has developed a healthful studio practice with a spiritual body in Los Angeles, where she founded the nonprofit dance studio Pieter as a response to her repressive dance training.
Tara Jane O’Neil is a musician. Since 1992 she has released 9 solo albums and collaborated with musicians, dancers, filmmakers and artists. She performs in rock clubs, festivals, DIY spaces, museums, and wilderness areas. Her visual art hangs on walls and sits in stacks or bookshelves. She makes salve.
Perin Hailey McNelis is a dancer and restoration horticulturist based in Patagonia, AZ. She holds a BFA in dance from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and her work has been presented by the Fourth Arts Block’s FAB Festival in New York, and by Machine Project, Home LA and Pieter in Los Angeles. She started working with James Kidd in 2012 as a dancer and PR manager for Pieter performance space. As a member of the Sunland Dancers since 2013, she performed at the Skirball Cultural Center, Machine Project’s Mystery theater, the Hammer Museum’s Made in LA biennial, the Getty Museum’s “Friday Night Flight” series, and various galleries. Perin returned to Arizona in 2015 to pursue her interests in regionally specific botany, natural resource management, and art + ecology in the borderlands. She continues to dance and is always seeking ways to connect her movement practice to her ecological work through exploring embodied experiences of landscape.
