Common Reading Artists

CASSIE MEADOR’S

DRIFT

Coming to Wesleyan’s Center for the Arts Theater Friday and Saturday, October 1 & 2, 8 pm

Cassie Meador is a choreographer/dancer/educator with the acclaimed Liz Lerman Dance Exchange based in Washington, D.C.  She states:  “Each of us has the right to move through our lives, to travel great and small distances with the power of our own bodies. Each step, each leap, and each gesture offers a window into our place in this world. Ultimately, perhaps, we arrive at the understanding that we are not separate from the environment. Art allows us to braid our personal stories with the larger conditions that shape our times.”  Her newest work, Drift, is a comic, provocative and wistful piece that asks us to think about where our food comes from as farmlands are converted to strip malls and California peaches end up in Georgia.

Meador will be teaching ENVS 346/DANC 346 The Ecology of Eating in the Fall of ‘10 Semester.

 

SUPERFLEX

Superflex is a Danish collective, founded in 1993 by Bjørnstjerne Christiansen, Jakob Fenger, and Rasmus Nielsen. The group has gained worldwide recognition for their projects that deal with such issues as financial and economic markets, democratic production conditions, self-organization, and environmentalism. Superflex bases their international projects on what they describe as "counter-economic strategies." The production and consumption of food and its repercussions is the focus of several Superflex projects in Zilkha's fall group exhibition Waste Not (Saturday, September 11-Sunday, December 12, 2010).  Featured in Waste Not is their mesmerizing 21-minute film Flooded McDonald's (2009), which playfully but evocatively examines the consequences of consumerism while touching on such issues as climate change and natural disasters. Documentation for two community-based projects will also be included. One is their Biogas project, implemented in Africa and Thailand and  based on the use of organic waste - pig excrement, in their case --- to create gas for cooking as well as for lighting. The other is their Guaraná Power project in which they worked with farmers in the Amazon to develop a soda from the caffeinated guaraná berry that is produced in the Brazilian Amazon.
Also see:

Superflex interview with Phong Bui in Brooklyn Rail: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2010/02/art/superflex

Interview with Superflex member  Bjornstjerne Christiansen by William Shaw http://www.artsandecology.org.uk/magazine/features/superflex--flooded-mcdonalds