Maida Withers Dance Construction Company

MaidaWithers
Current Projects
   A Choreographer's Life
   Fare Well
   Thresholds Crossed
   Russian Tour
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   Aurora/2001
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Int'l Improv Fest
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FARE WELL PROJECT (Photos/Description)

DANCE / NEW MUSIC / TEXT / NEW MEDIA INSTALLATION

Maida Withers, Concept, Director, Dancer, Filmmaker
Steve Hilmy, Electronic Composer/Musician
Ayo Okunseinde, Visual and New Media Artist
David McAleavey, Poet
Alex Caldiero, Performance Poet

Fare Well is a project by the Dance Construction Company that brings insight and vibrant critique to the contemporary issue of end time through dance, electronic music, text, and visual installation. End time may be viewed as the conclusion of creation myths.

Fare Well is as extreme in its moods and absurdities as we might think of "extreme weather." We watch hypnotized, immobilized, arrogant, innocent, and powerful - as the fires rage, volcanoes erupt, the Arctic melts, the earth becomes parched, and the seas rise. Fare Well - The End of the World As We Know It OR Dancing Your Way to Paradise is a solo dance performance by pioneering choreographer, Maida Withers - known locally and internationally for her innovative choreography and her intensity as a dancer.    In Ballet-Dance Magazine, Carmel Morgan writes, "Fare Well is a modern Greek-style tragedy, delivered by a warrior goddess."  (September 2008)

Maida and the collaborators have explored the idea of end time through choreographic residencies and performances nationally and internationally   Five projects have been developed in New York City (Uncertain World), Nairobi, Kenya through the Cultural Envoy program with U.S. Department of State, U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, and the GoDown Arts Centre (Parched Earth - Remembrances from Tomorrow), Salt Lake City for the Utah Arts Festival (Fare Well & Hell-O), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (Tipping Point), Puebla/Cholula, Mexico for Preformatica, and Kanab, Utah for the Amazing EarthFEST (Fare Well - The End of the World As We Know It OR Dancing Your Way to Paradise!). Following performances, audience members are invited to discuss views about the end of the world as we know it to bring cultural insight to the issue of end time.

Maida has created over 100 works for stage, site, and video. She has been called the “iconoclast of Washington dance.” Maida received the 2005 Washington, DC. Mayor’s Arts Award for Excellence in an Artistic Discipline and the prestigious 2006 DC Metro Dance Award for Outstanding Performance in a Large Venue (1500 seat theatre). Maida and the Company tour extensively internationally, over seventeen tours worldwide, including Russia, France, Poland, Brazil, Mexico, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Finland, Norway, China, Hong Kong, Korea, others. For more information, please visit other locations at this web site .

A captivating art video (visual poems) created by Ayodamola Okunseinde, multimedia and electronic artist, and Maida Withers is manipulated by Ayo in "real time" as it is projected onto the backdrop and onto the floor creating a spectacular immersive environment for the performer. The visual installation features animation, still, and moving images of extreme nature (ice bergs, firestorms, draught, tsunamis, volcanos), animals, faces, habitats, and other symbols of life on earth. This text will include poetry (poet TBA) and words and statements from science and other sources from newspapers and journals.

Original music is composed and performed by Steve Hilmy, electronic musician/composer, with his real-time interactive electronics, his experimentalism and post-apocalyptic noisemaking. Hilmy participated in the Cultural Envoy program in Nairobi, Kenya. Text and song is included as fragments of stories told by the Maida.

Haiku poems and other original writings by David McAleavey are spoken by Maida and projected as part of the visual poems and transformed into the music.  In Salt Lake City, Alex Caldiero presented scrolling texts and performed sound-text pieces touching on notions about the utoopian dream, apocalyptic thinking, current scientific views ranging from denial to doomsday predictions about end time, and the next step from here on and out.

Steve Hilmy received his Bachelor of Arts, 1984, from The George Washington University, and his Master’s of Music in Composition, 1991, from The Peabody Conservatory of Music of The John Hopkins University.  Hilmy was born in Aberdeen, Scotland.  He studied composition with William Albright at the University of Michigan and with Jean Eichelberger Ivey and Chen Yi at the Peabody Conservatory. Hilmy has been on the faculty of The George Washington University Music Department since 1992, where he is Director of the Electronic and Computer Music Studio. He has won awards from such organizations as the Southeastern Composers League, ASCAP, BMI, the Peabody Conservatory, and The Virginia Center for Creative Arts, including First Prize in the Philip Slates Memorial Composition Contest for "Icarus Falling" (piano and electronics, 1989); the Gustav Klemm Prize for Composition from the Peabody Conservatory in 1991; and 2nd place prize in the Prix d’été II composition competition at the Peabody Conservatory for “Us” (tenor saxophone and electronics, 1999).  Hilmy has worked with Maida Withers Dance Construction Company for several years, improvising in events and creating music for Thresholds Crossed and other choreography, touring with the Company in Russia and other countries.

Ayodamola Okunseinde – Multimedia / Electronic Artist.  Born in Montclair New Jersey, Ayo spent his formative years living in Nigeria, Oman and Holland. He studied at Rutgers University Mason Gross School of Art and New York Film Academy, La Femis Film Program, Paris, France. Ayo's extensive travels (33 countries) have influenced his work and artistic direction. As creative director and visual artist working in the multimedia field, Ayo has worked with notable artists like Donald Odita and Ike Ude.  He has made significant contributions to the Washington D.C. arts scene through his projects "Smacktv: a contemporary arts show", "SCENE" and "Variance". Collaborating with local artists, Ayo has helped to foster interdisciplinary arts projects including "Arabesque Rising," "New Music Compositions," and the "Fresh Produce Film Festival."  Heavily influenced by mass media and popular culture, he weaves these elements into his works. His skill and experience places him at a junction that allows him to speak of the vibrancy and interconnectivity of the arts and contemporary society. He speaks Yoruba, French, Japanese and aims to add Mandarin as an additional language. Okunseinde owns and operates Dissident Display Studios and Gallery on H St NE, Washington, DC (USA) For information:  http://www.dissidentdisplay.com; www.smacktv.com.

David McAleavey - Poet. Ph.D.  in English, Cornell University, 1975; MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry), Cornell University, 1972. In poetry I'm about as focused on formal attentiveness and innovation as I am on discerning truth, thrilled when the sine-waves of these interests overlap and amplify into an audible freshness.  As a scholar and poet alert to the European and American avant-garde movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, and having Language Writing to work with and against as I matured, I find it natural to expect links between the arts, and feel it important to attend to the ways various artists influence one another.  I have a growing interest in the relationship between American literature and other English-language national literatures, including the work of those with multiple or complex linguistic, ethnic, racial, and national identities. 

Alex Caldiero - Performance artist and poet. As a poet, polyartist, sonosopher, and scholar of humanities and intermedia, Caldiero makes things that sometimes appear as language or pictures or music, and then again as the shape of your own mind. Sicilian-born, New York-reared Caldiero has created distinguished sound poetry and performance, as well as visual art, most of it as elaborate expositions of spiritual themes that draw upon his European (Mediterranean) background. ‘The sacred and the secular have been at the very core of my formative years,’ he writes. ‘For me this twin presence is a pivot between sideshow and temple, between entertainer or jester and priest. In the process of making and presenting a work, this precarious position is the opening by which I can hope to glimpse the Real’….[His} Or, Book o’ Lights ranks among the most imaginative and ambitious visual-verbal books of the 1990s.” (From “Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes by Richard Kostelanetz). He is on the Philosophy/Humanities faculty at Utah Valley University where he is Poet/Artist in Residence. Caldiero is the author of numerous publications, visual works, CDs, and videos, including Body/Dreams/Organs (Elik Press), Various Atmospheres: poems and drawings (Signature Books); Sphota Probe (CD), Ah Bh Gh (artist book), U Latti Di La Matri/ The Milk of the Mother (bi-lingual Sicilian poems, CSSSS, Catania), Said Z (artist book), From Stone to Star (Incurve Press), Or: Book O= Lights (artist book), Pieces in Places (CD),Toy Blood (limited ed. self-published), Words: Exterior/Interior (video, produced by Steve Olpin), Illegible Tattoos (artist book), and recently SOUND WEAVE, word-music CD w/ Theta Naught. Caldiero is anthologized in Text-Sound Texts (Richard Kostelanetz, ed., Morrow, NY), and featured in the Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (Routledge, London/NY) and Utah: State of the Arts (Trudy McMurrin, ed., Meridian International, Ogden, UT).

Collaborators:

              Steve Hilmy                                   Maida Withers                      Ayo Okunseinde

Photos below: Fare Well Performance at Performatica in Puebla, Mexico, May 2009

Photos below: Fare Well Performance at Washington, DC Capital Fringe, July 2008

Photos below: Fare Well: The Tipping Point (Arctic & Antarctica) , Washington, DC, November 2007

Photo of Jadee Mitchell; Photo by Steven Foster (c) 2008

Photos below: Fare Well: Parched Earth: Remembrances From Tomorrow; Nairobi, Kenya, May 2008

Choreography: Maida Withers with Dancers: Neema Bagamunhanda, Rebecca Gatu; Joseph Kanyenjo, Michael Muriitha, Evans Ng'ang'a,
Kepha Oiro, Julliette Omalo, Mark Onyango, John. Lighting: John Njoroge (Photos from video by M Withers (c) 2008)

Photo below: Fare Well: Series #1, New York City, NY

Photo of Maida Withers (c) 2007