The Equus Project Performance
The Breaking Ring will be performed in the gallery spaces at ArtStart in Rhinelander, WI Friday and Saturday, March 16th & 17th starting at 7pm, and again on Sunday, March 18th at 2pm.
There will be a post-performance discussion after the performances on Friday and Sunday.
The Equus Projects is a New York dance company known for its indoor and out-of-door performances that often bring dancers and horses into shared landscapes. The innovative choreographic structures emerged from their creation process with equines and is taught in master classes and workshops calibrated for a broad range of populations ranging from dancers to educators, therapists to engineers and physicians. The Equus Projects has created commissioned works in 16 States and in Europe. Visit their Vimeo page to enjoy many videos of their work.
Created especially for the Northwoods engagement, The Breaking Ring is an indoor, gallery adapted work focused entirely on human behavior. Although Equus Projects sometimes performs with horses, this program will use them solely as inspiration while the company uses choreography to reveal how humans operate with the same immediacy as their animal partners.
“Horses are hyper aware,” JoAnna Mendl Shaw explains, “and totally present in the moment. They do not lie. They hold the human accountable. In much the same way, during The Breaking Ring the dancers interact with each other with a compelling, improvised directness that aspires to the same immediacy and transparency.”
The viewers will be invited into the action (if they would like) by the dancers in a way that the audience will determine content the outcome. Every performance will be slightly different, and those who have experienced “interactive theater” will be familiar with this style of performance, which has been growing in popularity in Minneapolis, Chicago, New York, and many places in Europe.
This event is a co-presentation between The Warehouse Art Center in Eagle River and ArtStart in Rhinelander and is supported by the Arts Midwest Touring Fund, a program of Arts Midwest, generously supported by the National Endowment for the Arts with additional contributions from Wisconsin Arts Board and the Crane Group.