HONEY

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Choreography by:

Joanna Rosenthal Read

Honey pours slowly taking audiences from casual intimacy into the allure of narcissistic pleasure. Using 1970’s disco as a source of inspiration, Honey plays within a queer space open to excess, risk, freedom, and fantasy. Disco becomes the gateway drug, transitioning the dancers into modern movement fueled by memory.

“What is so difficult, and brave, about “Honey” is the way it foregrounds sexuality in an environment this intimate. It’s impossible to look and impossible to look away. That sort of discomfort begs for relief in a lighter approach — and in fact the audience broke out laughing at one point when the dancers rushed on them. But it’s not an approach Read takes. Instead her accomplished performers seem to have been coached in open sensuality, reveling in private sensation, ogling one another. Intense interest alternates with alienation and distraction, in a vector true to the club scene.”

 

- Chicago Tribune, Laura Molzahn, 12/16

Performance Locations: Pivot Arts Festival, The Loft, Uptown, Elevate Chicago Dance, South Shore Cultural Center Chicago Illinois; Iowa City , Iowa; Spring To Dance, St. Louis, Missouri; Arts Midwest Conference, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

 

Support provided by: Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (Chicago), Illinois Arts Council