photo: Sharon Green
photo: Sharon Green
photo: Austin Forbord
photo: Sung-Joon Hwang
photo: Sharon Green
photo: Andy Mogg
photo: Sharon Green
a life worth living | the beast | bocaditos | body installations | ghosts of my friends | in good taste | warning signs | you know me better
septet, 2001, 24 minutes
A Life Worth Living is a look at the process of evaluating a life, the cyclical nature of resolutions, and the urge to better oneself where cycles of intense introspection are followed by slides into entropy. Everything is flux; all is perishable. The surface of your being is constantly crumbling. Life cannot be evaluated on a purely logical basis. The irrational, intuitive self interjects, intercedes and offers its own two cents. Every evaluation of a life involves an internal struggle for control.
In the piece there are five sections and a ‘prologue.’ Each of the five sections is based on one of the five ‘Heinous Crimes of Buddhism,’ five ‘crimes’ needed to become enlightened.
The feel of the work is old world Italy meets the circus with seven performers engaging in bizarre actions, breaking heads and physical dancing.
A Life Worth Living on YouTube
The Beast demonstrates a new direction for Adams—moving toward storytelling through text and movement. She takes the audience on the wild rollercoaster ride dealing with Western medicine as she confronts the ticking of her biological clock. The piece includes direction from the renowned Krissy Keefer, award winning choreographer, producer, and artistic director of Dance Brigade/Wicked Witch Productions in San Francisco.
With nods to the Medici’s patronage, the lack of modern funding, dwindling numbers of performance spaces and home theater, FTPG is creating “Bocaditos”, an evening of tasty little morsels, picked from a menu of items and performed anywhere from your living room to the Kennedy Center. Created as a series of small works (solos and duets), Bocaditos explore a wide range of relationships, thoughts and insights in miniature.
The producing body, whether a person with hosting a party, theater, festival or patron, picks from a menu of “appetizers”, “salads”, “main courses” and “deserts” to produce a unique show of their own. The result can be as light or dark as you please, with the average “meal” being about an hour.
Just like a caterer, we will perform these menu’s wherever we are asked and paid. Menus will be discussed and settled, payment discussed and flower arrangements are extra.
These deceptively simple acts offer beautiful thought provoking visions of labor. From dragging trees in the forest to tempting deer and birds to overcome their fear of people. Body installations are often participatory, and are designed to challenge the viewers preconceptions of everyday things.
Initial preview performed at the University of Wisconsin, Madison Spring 2005
Ghosts of My Friends is based on Peter Handke’s play The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other. The piece takes place on a street corner, a voyeuristic exploration of the sea of humanity, an absurd piece geared toward challenging societal assumptions and provoking self-reflection.
The Hour is a challenging movement driven play that reexamines the crisis of language, the joy of movement, the necessity of recognition and the involvement humans invest in one another. While the play has over two hundred transient characters, one single character remains on stage throughout the entire action: the town square. It is the perfect setting for complete strangers who meet but do not always greet, who move toward and away from each other, sometimes in silence. Do they have a story? What provokes people into making connections with some, and none with others?
Ghosts of My Friends creates this unique world that follows people on their route from one place to another. Ghosts is an interpretation of the play created for performers with a dance background.
The Square:
A town square where soccer players triumph, town fools mock everyone, refugees run from tragedy, circus freaks entertain, Isaac and Abraham journey off to prove devotion to God, tourists search for their way home, and a bride chases her veil before her wedding.
In Good Taste is a solo work choreographed and performed by Cynthia Adams with an original score by multi-instrumentalist, composer, and original instrument creator, Peter Whitehead. In Good Taste examines Cynthia's memories of her two grandmothers using poetic text, gesture, and piles of hand knit clothing. The audience is taken on a mouthwatering journey with a questioning look at our aging process.
Warning signs are pointers to change, to ends, to forbidden zones.
Most people plan on continuity to keep their lives comfortable. Here we plan on abrupt change, worst case scenarios and slippery curves to develop a game plan to deal with what ever life throws our way.
What do you pack?
What do you do?
How do you get your ducks in a row?
A 25 minute quintet, combining a philosophic examination of the mind and body with a layered, well crafted, choreographically and theatrically driven work to search for guidance in an unfamiliar and unpredictable world.
Five dancers, 250 ceramic ducks, video and sculpture meet paranoia in a kind of schizophrenic tango.
A piece about how people view each other, and how they view themselves.
Conversations where you know they aren't listening, dances where you partner would give anything to be somewhere else, idiosyncrasies blown out of proportion. Nine sections watch from the outside and the inside of the mind.
It has been said that any social interaction is a civil war. We couldn't agree more.
Choreographer : Ken James
Performers: Cynthia Adams, Chris Black, Andrew Alan Grant, Ken James, Jenny McAllister, Andrea Weber
length: 35min.
What other people think of us affects us when they are our friends, but even when we have no idea who they are we want people to support our own view of ourselves. Imagine you are buying CDs and the woman behind the register looks at you with disbelief — "What kind of dweeb would listen to this?" Extra points off if you think she is nice and want her to like you.