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Matthew Smith presents
"ADMITTANCE
An Evening in Seven Parts"
A collaborative dance theater work
December 4th, 5th, and 6th
Conceived, produced, and directed by Matthew S. Smith
Music composed by Matthew S. Smith
Choreographed by Deborah Jinza Thayer and Cathy Wright
Film by Matthew S. Smith and Matt Zawislak
Bush Fellowship Composer Matthew S. Smith presents an evening-length production, engaging choreographers Deborah Jinza Thayer and Cathy Wright in a work combining dance, film, and music. Set in the fear-laden atmosphere of the Cold War 1950s, at a time when the government was denying the effects of nuclear testing on its own soldiers, ADMITTANCE imagines the layers of trauma and denial in a family stunned by a mother’s schizophrenia and institutionalization. Paired with Thayer’s unique movement vocabulary and Wright’s arresting choreographic urgency, ADMITTANCE features Smith’s layered electro-acoustic score, weaving sound and bodies into a space where detonations obscure or expose what we’re able to admit.
Tickets:
$18 for Adults, $13 for Students and Seniors
Saturday at 5PM is Pay What You Can
Performances:
Thursday, December 4th - 8PM
Friday, December 5th - 8PM
Saturday, December 6th - 5PM P.W.Y.C. and 8PM
Purchase tickets now!
Artist Bios:
Matthew S. Smith
www.matthewsmithcomposes.com
“[A] painter who composes layered landscapes with rich textures, absorbing color depths, and dramatic swaths…a composer who pieces together fragments of 1/16-size Suzuki violin gestures into some of the most gorgeous soundscapes you are likely to hear.” - avantmusicnews.com
Matthew Sawyer Smith was born in 1953 in Cleveland, Ohio. He attended Oberlin College were he studied music and painting. As a painter, Smith has shown his work in galleries across the nation - Ohio, Washington, D.C., New York, and Minnesota (Groveland Gallery). In 1999, he came to a rather sudden realization that his creative expression was no longer served by painting, and switched to his lifelong second passion: music.
Co-creator of the American Composers Forum's SALON, a monthly program of new works by contemporary classical composers, Smith has been honored as a Bush Fellow (2007), McKnight Composing Fellow (2004), and Grammy Awards semi-finalist (2006). Building textures of recorded instrumentation like brush-strokes on a canvas, Smith’s contemporary classical compositions are collected in the 2005 audio release Archaic from INNOVA RECORDINGS. Again reaching across artistic disciplines, Smith’s music has been featured in dance/sound collaborations with Peter Witrak, Cathy Wright, Colleen Callahan, and Deborah Jinza Thayer.
Cathy Wright
“And we’d all better pay attention, because [she’s] good. Intriguing. Weird. Fantastical. Creepy, even. But good.” – mnartists.org
Cathy Wright (choreographer, teacher, performer) was a devoted fan of film directors David Lynch and Ridley Scott in her preteens, and as such, she started creating short films in high school. She then went on to the University of Utah for her BFA and MFA in Modern Dance, where she shocked peers with her “sacrilegious” compositions. She returned to the Twin Cities in 2002, teaching, directing, and choreographing while completing an MA in Education at Minnesota State University Mankato. She produced her own concert Dweller on the Threshold in August 2006 at the Bloomington Center for the Arts. It marked her first performance since 2001 in her solo Cannibal Mother.
Also active as a performer, her recent choreography has been staged at various Twin Cities venues, including the Walker Art Center’s McGuire Theater, the Southern Theater as part of the Momentum Series, Macalester College, Patrick’s Cabaret, and the MN Zoo. Her choreography has also been performed nationally at the University of the Arts and Merriam Theater (Philadelphia, PA), New World School of the Arts and the Gusman Center for Performing Arts (Miami, FL), and at the Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts, Marriot Center for Dance, art galleries and streets in Salt Lake City, UT. She has directed 24 productions at Apple Valley High School and has taught Pre-K through higher education at various schools across the country. More information can be found at www.mnartists.org/Cathy_Wright.
Deborah Jinza Thayer
“[A] typical Thayer experience—a strange encounter that’s also utterly normal to the extent that it speaks the language of living.” – City Pages
After spending the first six years in Japan and Southeast Asia, Deborah Jinza Thayer grew up in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland in 1984; trained in dance in New York City from 1984-93; and received an MFA in Dance from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia in 1997. Her most influential training includes Laban Bartienieff fundamentals and choreography under the direction of Karen Studd at GMU; Butoh with Maureen Fleming in New York; vocal dance with Amsterdam-based Patricia Bardi; various movement theater techniques; Global Somatics (Body Mind Centering) with Suzanne Rivers in Minneapolis; and the research of Eugenio Barba of the International School of Theater Anthropology (ISTA) in Copenhagen.
She has presented her choreography, Movement Architecture – a blend of dance and theater in structured environments – and has created approximately 50 original works in New York City, Washington DC metro region and Minneapolis. She has twice been a semi-finalist for France’s Rencontres choregraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis (Bagnolet), and received McKnight Choreographers Fellowship in 2004. She has been teaching ballet and modern dance technique since 1993 and currently teaches dance composition and technique at Zenon Dance Company and School in Minneapolis. For more information about Thayer’s distinctive approach to movement, visit http://www.movementarchitecture.com/.
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