Contact:
Callie Chapman Korn
4 Quincy Street, No. 3
Somerville, MA 02143
781.738.3272
callie@zoedance.org
www.zoedance.org
http://www.zoedance.org/video/abandon/trailer.html

For Immediate Release, November 2, 2006

Zoé Dance Invited to Perform “abandon” in Santiago, Chile by the Centro de la Cultura de Las Condes
January 20 – 21, 2007

Cambridge, MA – The Cultural Center of Las Condes [Santigo, Chile] has invited Zoé Dance of Boston to present “abandon” a new work choreographed by Callie Chapman Korn. “Abandon” was first performed at the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center, September 29 + 30, 2006. This is Zoé Dance’s first time touring internationally.

In 50 spare minutes, Callie Chapman Korn’s ambitious new “Abandon” beautifully charts the human transformation from guileless child to wary adult. The dance piece employs no narrative and few props to tell this most elemental of tales, but slowly and irrevocably, the five talented dancers of Chapman Korn’s Zoé Dance trace a journey of lost youth. – Karen Campbell, Boston Globe

There’s a complete, universal theme underneath the movement in Callie Chapman Korn’s latest dance, performed last night by Zoé Dance at the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center. “Abandon” centers on the shift from physical awareness to introspection. As children, we revel in the body. As adults, we might find ourselves in a whole host of eccentric mental loop statements. – Theodore Bale, Boston Herald

First performed as a work-in-progress (March 31, 2006 and April 1, 2006 at the Dance Complex) Abandon explores many facets of human relationships as we grow and develop in society. The animosity of the child turns into teenage rebellion and eventually into the sexual frustration and insecurity of the adult.

ARTIST STATEMENT: “As a person grows and develops from a child to an adult, the standpoint of human relationships changes continually. When you were a child it didn’t matter what the other child who was throwing stones into the river looked like, you wanted to throw stones into the river too. So you did. And all the while no judgment passed your mind about that other human being, he was enjoying life and you were too. Living in the moment.

As we grow older, we grow more judgmental and cruel to one another. Thus starting the vicious cycle of the importance of status, race, ethnicity, cultural backgrounds, sex, income, fashion, lifestyle, etc. This judgment starts possibly because that’s how we are taught to survive. We don’t show our vulnerabilities because the judgment we place on others hides this part of ourselves. To be kind to another human being is harder for some of us than to ignore or balk at one another.

What if a world existed where our instinctual emotional selves remained naïve like that of a child’s?”

In the first performance of Abandon, themes of social insecurity; fear of the dark and a metaphorical fear of a ‘support system’ played out with three men, a woman and a swing came together in a 25 minute long journey that could have touched on so many other facets.

In the expanded version of Abandon, three new sections will be added; Child-like patterning reminiscent of a playground, a scene that faces tension between insecurities of physical versus emotional intimacy, solidarity and the complexities of existing in one’s ‘own world’ completely, and an addition to the previous ending in which the current characters are replaced by child-like versions of themselves.

Abandon uses video projection to create ‘environments’ to surround the dance of a world of it’s own. Utilizing the mediums of dance and video, Abandon will be a self-contained theatrical experience that will make the audience feel as if they are, too in the dance themselves.

Dancers are: Sarah Ackley, Tamara Butts Sullivan, Ivan Korn, Jon Peck and Callie Chapman Korn.

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Zoé Dance has presented its work since 2002 in various venues around Boston such as: World Music/CRASH Art's "Ten's the Limit" at Green Street Studios, the Somerville Theatre [ArtBeat 2004], The Julie Ince Thompson Theatre ["Virgin", produced by the Dance Renewal Project, self produced concerts and the Dance Complex's Shared Choreographers Concert], Harvard Square [May Fair 2004], Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center [the Choreographers Group, 2004], Tower Auditorium at Massachusetts College of Art [2003], Earth Dance [Outdoor Performance Festival, 2002].

Callie Chapman Korn [Artistic Director, Choreographer], holds a B.F.A. in dance from the Boston Conservatory. She is a dancer with Prometheus Dance and has presented her work both independently and as part of Zoé Dance, most recently in an independently produced concert "Piel contra piel" at the Dance Complex. She has worked with choreographers such as Nicola Hawkins, Mariela Cerda Villablanca [Chile], Frente de Danza Independiente [Ecuador], Sean Curran and Colin Conor.