Rhythmically Speaking Announces a Virtual Screendance Premiere Featuring Jazz, RadioHead and Winter
Tuesday, January 26, 2021 at 9:47AMVia a January 26 e-announcement:
Rhythmically Speaking (RS) is thrilled to premiere our first original screendance February 26th, 2021 from 7-8pm via Zoom. Like many a performing arts company, the good people of Rhythmically Speaking have embraced COVID-necessitated pivots to learn new skills and ways of sharing art: for us this last few months, it’s been figuring out how to make dance films outside! We are proud to be premiering RadioBody: The Screendance Iteration virtually with our home audience before submitting it to dance film festivals across the country! The screening event will also feature peeks into the creation process and a Q&A with the artists.
Originally undertaken with a February 2021 stage show at Amsterdam Bar & Hall in downtown St. Paul in mind (which will now occur February 2022), The RadioBody Project is a collaboration with local composer Mike Lauer exploring the jazz sensibilities and human toil and triumph embedded in the work of pioneering alt-electronic band Radiohead. Thanks to their rich, multilayered rhythms, unique harmonies and long-form jams, their songs are often covered by jazz composers. A favorite band of RS Artistic Director Erinn Liebhard, when she began to discover this connection between Radiohead and jazz, she felt compelled to explore it through movement.
Together, composer Lauer and AD Liebhard selected one song from each major Radiohead album for the stage show, and from those, selected three to explore for the screendance iteration of the project: “Knives Out” from album Amnesiac (2001), “High and Dry” from The Bends (1995), and “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” from In Rainbows (1997). Lauer recorded his original renditions of these songs for the film, playing guitar and rounding out the ensemble with bass guitar and cello (Greg Byers), saxophone (Andrew Long), and drums (Ben Erlich). The rest of the artistic personnel include our company of seven dancers and videography team TJ Tronson and Cully Gallagher of Flywheel Media Productions, who braved the Minnesota Winter for outdoor, wilderness film shoots: the main of which we were lucky enough to be among landscapes covered in rare, beautiful rime ice!
There are a total of 100 Zoom sign-ins available for this premiere event, reserved through Eventbrite. A donation of $15-$20 per person watching is suggested, and can be made at our GiveMN page. 10% of the proceeds from this event will be donated to the scholarship fund of Hopewell Music North: we are thrilled to be building a multi-faceted partnership with them to help better access to jazz music and movement learning experiences on the North side of Minneapolis. Dance, Jazz and Radiohead fans alike, we hope you’ll join us for this event!
Using the rhythm that is at our shared human core to groove together, Rhythmically Speaking cultivates vibrant, embodied human connection. Since our founding in 2008, we've gotten 350+ artists and thousands of audience members grooving together through presentation of 95 original and remounted works and over 30 workshops and other events.
