12 Aug 2010

Sens Production: MELT by Noémie Lafrance

After touring the world, MELT returns to New York for a two-week run. With this full evening-length version of MELT, Lafrance invites audiences to a stunning industrial site used by the city to store salt, located under the Manhattan Bridge in Lower Manhattan. During the highs of NYC's heat waves, MELT embodies its full meaning when seven dancers perched on small seats affixed to a wall and wrapped in sculptural beeswax and lanolin costumes are slowly melting away. Dancers gradually progress in euphoria and exhaustion as if approaching the sun, melting until their souls escape their ephemeral bodies and disintegrate into light. This surreal performance enraptures the audience in a sensual, dramatic and delicate experience of the physical body in exile and surrender. Seen by the audience from below in close perspective, MELT is both meditative and captivating, combining intensity and vulnerability with original choreography; a spectacle of the beautiful and the grotesque and at once a performance and a three-dimensional live sculpture.

WHO
MELT is choreographed by Noémie Lafrance and is performed by Celeste Hastings, Mare Hieronimus, Adi Or Kfir, Teresa Kochis, Ori Lenkinski, Meghan Merril, Marcy Schlissel and Elizabeth Wilkinson. The performance is set to a electronic score by Erin McGonigle, the lighting design is by Thomas Dunn begin_of_the_skype_highlighting     end_of_the_skype_highlighting and the performance is produced by Noémie Lafrance and Natalie Galazka for Sens Production.

Noémie Lafrance is known as a site-specific choreographer staging urban architecture with choreography. She has also choreographed for films, operas, TV commercials and music videos including Feist's music video 1234 which was nominated for a Grammy Award and won the Prix Victoire de la Musique, David Byrne's world tour, Doug Aitken's Sleepwalkers at MoMA and commercials for clients including Daffy's, Bloomingdales, Clarks, iPod and many others. Sens Production is an award winning not-for-profit dance-production company that produces the work of site-specific choreographer Noémie Lafrance, performed live in public spaces and on film. Our site-specific dance work invites audiences to immerse themselves in the architecture of the city, offering them new vantage points from which to view the world. Large-scale public work Agora produced by Sens Production and created by Lafrance was said to have changed the urban fabric of NYC – [La Presse]. Prior works include: Agora, a piece that brought back to life the abandoned 50,000 sq feet McCarren Park Pool and was seen by more than 15,000 people; Descent performed in the 12-story stairwell of a city court building for a total of 11 weeks, received 2 Bessie Awards and was named one of the 10 best performances of the year in both Time Out NY and The New York Times in 2002; Noir presented as part of the Whitney Biennial 2004 and staged in a municipal parking garage where audience were seated in cars and; the Rapture Series, a series of performances staging the architecture of Frank Gehry worldwide. Short films directed and choreographed by Lafrance and produced by Sens Production include Eyes Nose Mouth, Rapture Film and Descent.


MELT is produced by Sens Production and was originally conceived and presented as a work in progress at the Black and White Gallery in Brooklyn in 2003. This presentation of the completed version
of the work was funded by DCA, NYSCA, LMCC (through The September 11th Fund and the Swing Space Program), Sens Production and private sponsors and donors.

WHERE
The Salt Pile, Corner of Pike Slip & South Street, under the Manhattan Bridge, in Lower Manhattan, NYC
F train to East Broadway

WHEN
August 19-22 & 26-29, 2010
Thurs-Sat 7:30PM & 8:30PM
Sunday 6:30PM & 7:30PM

Opening Night Benefit Thursday, August 19th
Reception 6:30PM
Performance 7:30PM, tickets $100

TICKETS
www.sensproduction.org (718) 302-5024
Online: Regular $20 Priority $40 Student $15 Group of 10 $100
At the door: Regular $25 Priority $45 Student $17 Group of 10 $125

MELT
A site-specific dance installation by Noémie Lafrance

«You have to see this living tableau to really get its impact and evocative power»
Silvie St-Jaques - LA PRESSE

Press Contact
Monika Jouvert
(718) 564-9151 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting             
senspress@sensproduction.org