Conference Of The Birds by Nejla Yatkin Comes to Gathering Spaces at Burnham Wildlife Corridor
CHICAGO, June 21, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Award winning choreographer and recent 2018 Drama Desk nominee, Nejla Yatkin, returns home to Chicago, bringing her signature process of building site-specific dances with local participants to Chicago's Gathering Spaces in Burnham Wildlife Corridor (BWC).
German-born choreographer Nejla Yatkin will create a site-specific, promenade-style interactive dance performance that moves the audience along the lakefront from the Caracol Gathering Space to La Ronda Parakata Gathering Space in BWC. Local participants will guide the audience in an interactive and participatory movement practice inspired by bird flocking behavior to transform audience perceptions and engage with their environment in new and unexpected ways. Yatkin invites her audience into a place and time, exposing it, exploring it, penetrating it, and then transcending it through movement.
For Conference of the Birds, Yatkin will work with local community members to choreograph a unique movement experience. Yatkin will spend the summer engaging pedestrian and trained dancers alike in dance and movement meditation workshops designed to heighten the senses through observation, heuristic conversation, and dancing.
Filmmaker and longtime collaborator, Enki Andrews, will be documenting participants' experience of transformation throughout the process, revealing what they wish to transform in themselves and in their community. The material developed through these workshops and explorations of the lakefront environment will inform and inspire the final dance as well as a short-form documentary video.
Free public performances will be held over three weekends on September 1, 2, 8, 9, 15, and 16, 2018; 5-7pm.
Where: Starting at Caracol Gathering Space and ending at La Ronda Parakata Gathering Space When: September 1, 2, 8, 9, 15, and 16; 5-7pm
What: Free, interactive site-specific dance performance choreographed by Nejla Yatkin (www.ny2dance.com)
Conference Of The Birds by Nejla Y. Yatkin is presented as part of the Chicago Park District's Night Out in the Parks series, supported by Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Arts programming in neighborhoods across the city advances the goals of the Chicago Park District and the Chicago Cultural Plan. Now in its sixth year, the 2018 Night Out in the Parks series will host over 1,000 cultural events and programs at more than 250 neighborhood parks throughout the city, making community parks a safe haven and hubs of activity. Projects will vary from traditional performances and concerts, to movies, peace rallies, community workshops, nature based programs, dance pieces, festivals, and more. The Chicago Park District has partnered with more than 100 arts and community organizations to expand and produce this successful initiative.
About Nejla Yatkin:
Award-winning and critically acclaimed choreographer and dancer, Nejla Yatkin, is a recent Drama Desk Award Nominee and 3Arts Awardee. Nejla hails from Germany, bringing a luminous, transcultural perspective to her creations. Her focus is regularly drawn to the role that memory and history serve in constructing identity, causing and resolving conflict, and transforming cultural tensions into deep, authentic revelations of human connection.
Her recent dances have been inspired by pivotal events in significant places around the world including The Berlin Wall Project, Oasis: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About The Middle East but Were Afraid To Dance, and Dancing Around the World, a conceptual site-specific artwork that investigates the potency of urban spaces and the people who inhabit them. Dancing Around The World was a year-long project that circumnavigated the globe, traveling to 20 cities and engaging dozens of communities in movement explorations of their urban environment and their complex relationships to it.
For more information visit www.ny2dance.com
Media contact: Scott Lundius
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312.520.5240
SOURCE Nejla Yatkin
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