On October 27th, in the final weekend of Melt My Heart But Spare My Soul, New Dialect will be performing an original dance on which Guncotton, the collaborative work by Greg Pond, Cesar Léal, and Banning Bouldin, is based. They will be accompanied by a sound installation by composer Cesar Léal and vocalist Jessica Usherwood.
There will be one half hour performance beginning at 7 PM located at 917 E 16th Street in Chattanooga.
All events are free and open to the public.
About Guncotton
Guncotton is the accidental result of blending very different substances that produced an explosive material that was important to the development of film photography.
Initial dance research investigates the impact of intensive and extensive properties of matter, coherence, and incoherence on the human body through improvisational tasks. These tasks are both sensation based, illustrating qualitative states such as density, sharpness, softness, translucence, etc, and form driven, exploring changes in scale, fragmentation, collapsing points in the body, unfolding to extrude lines and curves, etc. Dancer Banning Bouldin applies these modalities to individuals and groups of dancers. Pond then 3D scans the dancers to generate sculptures, drawings, and sound that illustrate both the dancers’ physical histories and the impact of the prompts on the multiple disciplines of our project using computer code Pond and computer programmers Marianne Sanders and Charles Stehno write to reinterpret the dancers.
This project generates live performances, printed images and a book, videos from the 3D motion capture drawing computer program, and sculptural and sound installations. Text from our discussions of this work are transcribed, generating a log of the entire collaborative process.
Greg Pond is a graduate of The University of Georgia and earned his MFA from The University of the South, Sewanee. He is currently on faculty at The University of the South, Sewanee and has been awarded Tennessee State Individual Artist grant, is a recent Kennedy Fellow at the University of the South, and has been an artist in residence at the F+F School of Art in Zurich and the Burren College of Art in Ireland. Greg also works as an independent writer, curator, and lecturer with recent projects and events hosted by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, Fivemyles Gallery in Brooklyn, Delta Axis in Memphis, the Frist and Cheekwood Museums of Art in Nashville.
New Dialect is a nonprofit contemporary dance collective and training program based in Nashville. Their mission is "to advance the evolution of our art form by inspiring people of all social backgrounds, cultures, and generations with authentic, high-quality dance workshops and performances that connect us more deeply to ourselves and each other. To this end, we strive to be a resource for choreographers, dancers, and teaching artists in need of a fertile and supportive environment in which to deepen their own movement research." Designed to be a research lab, New Dialect aims to facilitate an environment where movers of all kinds can explore the wide variety of groundbreaking movement vocabularies that exist in the world of contemporary dance. Having greatly benefited from her training at Juilliard, founder and artistic director Banning Bouldin now endeavors to foster a fertile and supportive environment, where people are given “tools not rules” that allow them to connect deeply with their bodies as they learn how to interpret a broad range of choreographic languages with skill and authenticity.