Economies of Effort: 2

Economies of Effort is a  triptych of full-length dances in which the dancers build, animate, and repurpose the world they inhabit. The first part premiered in San Francisco (USA) in February. The second installment will be created during a residency at STL, and features four pairs of dancers – one couple, a mother and grown daughter, one set of close friends, and a mother and young son. Over the course of the residency Pearlman will work with each pair to create personal vocabularies tied to the subtle, often private, intricacies of their relationships. Each pair will map out a blueprint of a real or imagined space they share, on the floor of the theater. Then we will intercut the movement generated by the duets, swapping out who does what, overlaying the maps, and creating a more complicated world that reflects on the complexity of relationships and the social economy of community. “Economy,” in this work, informs the process of making the dance as much as it does the content.

Cid Pearlman makes dances about real people, and is intensely interested in how we negotiate being together in a complex world. Her choreography has been presented by numerous venues including ODC Theater, Joyce SoHo, Kanuti Gildi SAAL, NOTAFE, the Getty Center, Theatre Artaud and the Museum of Contemporary Art/San Diego. Among other honors she has received a Fulbright Award from the US Department of State, and she has been twice awarded a Djerassi Resident Artist Fellowship. Most recently Pearlman was an artist in residence at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. Pearlman is committed to working with contemporary composers; past performances have featured collaborations with Joan Jeanrenaud, Jonathan Segel, Erling Wold, Albert Mathias, and Haroon Tahir. Pearlman first came to Estonia in 2009 to teach and collaborate with local artists; she has returned nearly every year since then. Steeped in postpunk aesthetics and known for “capturing the poetic attachment in human bonds” (Oakland Tribune), Cid Pearlman’s work for dance, theater, film and opera unbalances conventional ideas about desire, gender, friendship and our ability to take action in the world.