Week 2: July 5 – 8
Finding Soul: A Constellation of Stories
Directed by Andrea Parson & Susan Banyas
Featuring Andrea Parson, Megan Dawn and Stephanie Schaaf
A “soul story” is an experience remembered. A journey. A memory. A moment brought to life. That thing where you internally replay what might be the movie of your life, but in multimedia dance narrative. In front of other people. In Finding Soul: A Constellation of Stories, three Portland-area dance artists integrate language and movement onstage, mining their own cosmic cinematic memories for visual and emotional details that give voice to the characters, landscape and actions that have shaped their individual lives. And then they dance it out.
JOURNEY. MEMORY. MOMENT.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Andrea Parson began her early dance training in Hillsboro, Oregon, at Northwest Conservatory of Dance under the direction of Anita Mitchell. She received her B.A. from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles in 2008. Andrea has taught dance throughout Oregon and Washington and has participated in workshops with the Joffrey Ballet, San Francisco Conservatory of Dance, anoukvandijk dc and NW Dance Project. In June 2010, Dance Magazine named Andrea their dancer “On the Rise.” The following month, Andrea received her biggest career honor to date, winning a 2010 Princess Grace Award for Dance and she appeared on the cover of Dance Spirit Magazine in February 2011, which did a feature on her and another on the company. She has danced original roles in NW Dance Project works by Sarah Slipper, Patrick Delcroix, James Canfield, Luca Veggetti, Pedro Dias, Ihsan Rustem, Andrea Miller, Aszure Barton, Jirí Pokorny, Yin Yue, Noam Gagnon, Benoit-Swan Pouffer, Maurice Causey, Danielle Agami, Lucas Crandall, Wen Wei Wang, Alejandro Cerrudo, Gregory Dolbashain, James Gregg, Cayetano Soto, Loni Landon, Tracey Durbin, Edgar Zendejas, Carla Mann, and Minh Tran.
Susan Banyas has worked extensively as a dancer, writer, and performance artist since 1976, when she co-founded SO&SO&SO&SO and began to develop Soul Stories and Everyday Dancing, forms that integrate movement, image, and language into physical poetry. She has taught in colleges, universities, studios, and schools for the past 40 years and has directed and created numerous full-length dance/theatre works, including The Hillsboro Story and No Strangers Here Today, multi-voiced investigations that illuminate the role her hometown played in American civil rights history and the journey to encounter that history directly. Both pieces toured nationally and are expanded into a non-fiction book, The Hillsboro Story, to be published in 2018-19 by Spuyten Duyvil Press, NYC. The Shadow Dance is Holy– outtakes and performance monologues – is in development.
