Symbiosis - World Premiere Dance with Live Music by Choreographer+Composer Duo Kara Davis and Sarah Zaharako

Description

Dance Mission’s Down and Dirty Series presents new and retrospective work by project agora’s co-director Kara Davis and composer Sarah Jo Zaharako. The evening begins with choreography performed by Davis and project agora company dancers and concludes with selected music composed and performed by the four members of Gojogo. Davis’ choreographic portion of the evening will include two Isadora Duncan nominated works (Exit Wound, and one Tuesday afternoon…) audience favorite A Softened Law, and will premiere Symbiosis, a solo work performed by Ms Davis with music composed by Ms Zaharako. Supported by their respective ensembles, project agora and Gojogo, this evening of music and dance will celebrate five years of collaboration and creative dialogue between Davis and Zaharako. Exit Wound, Davis and Zaharako’s first collaboration (2005), and newest work Symbiosis bookend the evening. Three performances will be given Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, July 9, 10, & 11 at 8 p.m. at Dance Mission Theater in San Francisco, 3316 24th Street (@ Mission Street). Dance Mission Theater is directly across the street from 24th Street BART station.

About the Performance:
The premiere of the evening Symbiosis features Davis as a solo dancer with live music composed by Zaharako, performed by Gojogo - a quartet featuring violin, bass, guitar, Indian percussion and electronics. Webster’s dictionary defines symbiosis as “the living together of two dissimilar organisms, especially when this association is mutually beneficial”. This work uses the relationship between dance and music as a starting point to explore the duality that exists within every human being: darkness and light, war and peace, sadness and laughter, expectation and regret, freedom and confinement, inhalation and exhalation, chaos and structure, and sound and vision. Symbiosis’ placement of improvisation within set structure allows the solo to breathe differently each time it is performed and requires equal creative and collaborative participation between Davis and Gojogo.
Inspired by Davis’ recent experiences in Israel, Palestine, and Egypt A Softened Law, explores the internal landscape of human faith within the heart and how surrounding conditions mold an individual’s notion of God. Premiering to sold-out audiences in Dec 2009 at ODC Theater, this work was initiated by an international group of artists in dialogue over the origins of religion as it relates to human conflict (internally and externally): Can war and prayer exist without each other? Does war necessitate prayer? Does religious devotion factionalize people to the point of conflict? How does one’s inner conflict surrounding an immeasurable “Absolute” correlate to the conflicts found within society. Collaborators include Egyptian poet Hussein Shakara, with translations made by Israeli dramaturge Itay Weizner and Iranian American Shirin Keyani-Rose. Original music is scored by Bay Area composer Jethro Dehart.
Also on the bill, one Tuesday afternoon…explores the composition of chain reactions and
the effect a single relationship can have within society. Davis and Zaharako’s first collaboration Exit Wound (2006) features Kara Davis with Bay Area favorite Nol Simonse. Transferring the cliché’ of “two-steps-forward-one-step-back” into an intricate waltz of tangling and untangling limbs, Exit Wound expresses the subtleties of interdependency within romantic intimacy.

Partnership Bio and Narrative
Choreographer Kara Davis and composer Sarah Jo Zaharako began their collaborative partnership in 2005 at a time when they were each facing personal and professional turning points. Based on hours of conversation that revealed unexpected similarities in their creative processes, Zaharako and Davis created and premiered Exit Wound in 2005. In 2007, Davis and Zaharako created Hard Ground, an appendage to Exit Wound, which incorporated eight dancers and a live musical ensemble including violin and two double basses, with gongs and singing bowls. Davis and Zaharako’s collaborative process begins and ends with improvisation. This multidisciplinary approach to creation has informed Davis and Zaharako of their work in ways impossible to simulate solely within their individual fields. Furthermore it generates a deeper dialogue between dance and music that focuses on interdependency rather than dictatorship.

Kara Davis
A native of Hutchinson, Kansas, Kara has danced for several ballet companies including Ballet Met, Atlanta Ballet, Ohio Ballet, the San Francisco Opera Ballet and Ballet Jorgen in Toronto, Ontario. As a 14-year resident of San Francisco she has danced for Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, Pearl Ubungen Dancers & Musicians, Mary Carbonara, Robert Moses, Kathleen Hermesdorf, and currently The Foundry. She is a founding member of KUNST-STOFF and Janice Garrett & Dancers. She won an “Izzie” in 2003 for “Outstanding Achievement in Individual Performance” for “her season” as a Bay Area free-lance artist. Rachel Howard of the SF Chronicle listed her as the “MVP” for 2005. Her choreography has been shown at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Marin Headlands, ODC Theater, Cowell Theater, SFMOMA, and Arizona State University. “Milliseconds”, commissioned by the LINES Ballet BFA program through the
Dominican University, will be shown at the Kennedy Center in May 2010 as part of the American College Dance Festival’s National Gala performance. Ms Davis has taught at the Atlanta Ballet School, Berkeley Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, ODC School, San Francisco Dance Center, Mills College, UC Berkeley, The Guongdong Dance Academy in Guongzhou, China, and currently The LINES Ballet School and BFA programs. As a 2009 CHIME recipient (Margaret Jenkins Dance Lab) she spent and entire year working alongside the enriching mentorship of Bay Area choreographer Alex Ketley and was also an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts.

Sarah Jo Zaharako
Sarah Jo Zaharako began her musical training at age five in Indiana. She studied classical violin as a child and attended Oberlin Conservatory. Sarah moved to the Bay Area in 1999 in order to expand her musical scope. In 2002, she completed a Masters of Fine Arts at Mills College where she studied violin with David Abel and improvisation with Fred Frith. Sarah now performs and composes for creative music ensembles in the San Francisco Bay Area including Gojogo and Seventh Avenue String Quartet. She also plays with Matt Small’s Chamber Ensemble. In addition to composing for instrumental groups, Sarah creates music for dance. She has premiered works with Ballet Counterpointe, Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet pre-professional program, the Rotterdam Dance Academy, and project agora.


project agora’s Mission and History
The primary mission of project agora is to promote creative dialogue between artists through interdisciplinary collaborations. Co-founded in May 2006 by San Francisco dancers/choreographers Bliss Kohlmyer Dowman & Kara Davis, this curatorial organization draws its mission from its Greek name: "Agora" (a public forum; a place designated specifically for open debate and the exchange of ideas). Drawing on a history of sharing in the creation and performing of works by Janice Garrett as well as years of common training, teaching extensively in the San Francisco dance community, friendship and critical dialogue, these two Bay Area artists join forces to promote their creative voices within the new generation of San Francisco choreographers. By presenting evenings and creating events that involve artists who challenge yet share similar influences and aesthetic values, project agora strives to illuminate how all forms of artistic expression both inform and are relevant to each other. project agora presented its first Home Season, "Threshold", to sold-out audiences in May 2006. Rachel Howard of the San Francisco Chronicle noted: "Both women are riveting presences, and they count among their willing friends many of the Bay Area's finest dance performers. This made Friday's opening for their newly formed project agora at Dance Mission Theater far more rewarding than most debuts." In its short four-year history, project agora has received two Isadora Duncan award nominations for ensemble (Davis' "Exit Wound" - 2006), and choreography (Davis' "one Tuesday afternoon…" 2008), and has received one commission by The Stanford Dance Department (cosponsored by Stanford Lively Arts) to create a new work (Kohlmyer-Dowman's "Distant Hues" - one of five site-specific pieces in an evening entitled "Red Rover").
Since September 2006, project agora has hosted a dancer/musician improvisation jam that brings the dance and music communities together to explore different modalities of improvisation. The jam has been featured on SPARK over the past several years and has involved over 800 Bay Area artists as well as national and international guests. project agora has presented evenings of performance at Dance Mission Theater (May 2006), City Hall (June 2007), San Francisco Community Music Center (September 2008, March 2009), Yerba Buena Center for The Arts (West Wave Dance Festival August 2008), and The Marin Headlands Center for the Arts (October 2009). In December of 2009 ODC Theater produced an evening pairing project agora (Kara Davis) with New York’s Kate Weare. This dynamic presentation was sold-out by the Monday before Saturday’s opening night during the height of the holiday season leaving audiences wanting more.

More Info

Link

http://www.gojogo.com/symbiosis

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510-435-7525

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415-273-4633 (Box Office)

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