The Land of Plenty
an audiovisual performance by Jennifer Allen, Chris Peck, and Deke Weaver
Thursday, March 25, 2010 | 8pm | $5
THE LAND OF PLENTY
WHICH GIVES A RICH TASTE+GRAINY TEXTURE YOUR ENTIRE FAMILY WILL LOVE FOR TOAST
A performance with video + real human beings + living sound
Created + performed by Jennifer Allen, Chris Peck, Deke Weaver
There is a Wallace Stegner quote on a plaque in Idaho’s Craters of the Moon National Monument:
“A place is nothing in itself. It has no meaning, it can hardly be said to exist, except in terms of human perception, use and response.”
Manifest Destiny and the American Dream mold the nation – how we imagine ourselves, how we imagine the land. But surely there are places that exist outside “human perception, use and response,” places that have a spiritual existence beyond our presence. Underneath the national myths lie older Judeo-Christian myths, which rest on even older stories, older stories where the land clearly shaped human culture. While clear-cuts and tract-homes are obvious examples of how we shape and imagine the land, how does the land shape us?
Like blind monks describing an elephant with laptops and panflutes, Allen, Peck and Weaver perform live in a multi-projection video environment. With sing-alongs, dancing sandhill cranes, cowboy songs, Led Zeppelin guitar solos, evil bunny prayers, the (fictional) collaboration between John Cage and Karl Marx, a re-enactment of A Discussion of Form juxtaposed with the “sacred geometry” of crop circles, a meditation on the Great Plains, the natural world, and myth, The Land of Plenty hops back and forth over the fuzzy gray line that defines kooks and saints, sentimental mumbo jumbo and deeply felt ritual, New Age cheese and the breathtaking, the haunting, the disturbingly beautiful.
Originally staged as a work-in-progress for Roulette’s 2008 Mixology Festival (NY), Allen joins Peck and Weaver for the Spring 2010 tour of The Land of Plenty. The piece can be adapted to many venues. A six minute video document from the 75 minute work-in-progress is available here.
JENNIFER ALLEN is a choreographer/performer recently transplanted to Champaign, IL. She has created several original evening-length works, her most recent, Open, was performed at The Kitchen (NYC) in April 2007. Her work has been shown at numerous locations in NYC including Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church and The Brooklyn Museum and in Chicago at Links Hall and Millenium Park. Allen was a 2005 MacDowell Colony Fellow and has received support from the Brooklyn Arts Council, the Oregon Regional Arts and Culture Council, Movement Research Artists in Residence and a residency through PICA. As a performer she has worked with such influential artists as Yvonne Meier, John Jasperse, Donna Uchizono, DD Dorvillier and Jennifer Monson among others.
CHRIS PECK is a Michigan-born composer investigating the peculiarities of listening and perception through a diverse practice that includes works for large untrained groups, interdisciplinary performance collaborations, and improvisation with the computer. His frequent work with dance has included scores for RoseAnne Spradlin, Eleanor Bauer, Jasperse, David Dorfman, Jeanine Durning, Ming Yang/Dance Forum Taipei, Abby Yager, and others. Ongoing projects include Listening Music for the Age of Crystal Moon Cone, a series of ambient electroacoustic performances and recordings with Stephen Rush and Jon Moniaci, Brooklyn Adult Recorder Choir, directed with choreographer Beth Gill, the Live Sh– performance series curated with Chase Granoff, Manpack Variant, an electronics duo with Jaime Fennelly, and collaborations with interdisciplinary video/performance artist and storyteller Deke Weaver. Chris is currently working on an MA at the Dartmouth College Digital Musics Program in Hanover, NH.
DEKE WEAVER is a writer, performer, video and graphic artist. Experimental theater, film/video, dance, and solo performance venues have presented Weaver’s interdisciplinary performances and videos in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Europe, Russia, and the U.S. A resident at Yaddo and Ucross, a four-time fellow at the MacDowell Colony, and a 2009 Creative Capital grantee, his work, described as “explosive” (San Francisco Weekly) and “brilliant” (The Village Voice) has “handcuffed a secure storytelling knack to a performance style that pushes the energy envelope toward hyperventilating madness” (Sidewalk.com). He also contributes film/video to dance and theater works in the U.S. and abroad. From 1999-2005 he was the Senior Animator for the Showtime Networks’ Broadcast Design Group. He is currently an assistant professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
