Culture Fiend

SLIDESHOW: Two dancers “steel themselves against the unstable ebbs and swells of absence” in Part and Parcel’s (choreographer Allie Hankins) new piece “By Guess & By God.” Photos courtesy Tim Summers.

Alice Gosti’s “Spaghetti CO” begins with a simple setting: three performers around a dinner table and a huge bowl of spaghetti. The project’s aim is more complicated: it “seeks to investigate the relationship that individuals and families have with food, and the memories that are attached to certain tastes and smells; for example the capability that food has the ability to make one feel at home or very far from home.”

The Blank Department (Drew Dillhunt, Jed Dunkerley, Jenelle Greninger, Mike Katell and Jason Puccinelli) is an “art rock band that wanted to enlarge the scope of its performing experience beyond playing motley sets of music in clubs and bars.” Their act “Orders of Magnitude” includes original animation, the band’s opinions about the extinction of dinosaurs, and three actors performing silent vignettes.

Paige Barnes’s “War Is Over” was “Inspired by the spirit and physicality of boxing,” Exploring the idea of self-sabotage, the dance looks at the desire to win a three-rounding boxing match…with yourself.

Finger is Julie Baldridge and Jeppa K Hall’s (a.k.a. Queen Shmooquan) musical duo. They perform “haunting madrigals about sex and death,” that recall “old-fashioned murder ballads, folk music, and avant-garde death metal.”

Choreographer Jessica Jobaris’s “You’re the thing that sets me free” centers on “how we hasten healing through the five ‘opiates’ of suffering: endurance, denial, transcendence, revenge and escape.” It promises to include athletic movement, ancient indigenous practices, psycho-therapy, and Celine Dion in a matador’s suit.