Toni Dove's Lucid Possession

I just got the brochure for HERE‘s annual Culturemart in the mail and I’m impressed by the variety of work and by the riskiness of the program. And  I mean riskiness in the sense of  both the work, which I assume will be consistent with HERE’s genre-blurring aesthetic, but also the artists of whom I have heard of only a few.  HERE differs from every other venue downtown in that they really invest in artists at an early stage and they have a program -the HERE Artist Residency Program, or HARP – that gives artists the room, time, tools and resources to grow their work. And every year HERE stages CULTUREMART as a way of giving HARP artists  a chance to show what they’re working on. It is a very cool and brave thing for a venue to do, to annually make time for fully-staged works-in-progress. But at the same time, it not only serves the artists by letting the grow their work over time, but it helps audiences to be a part of an ongoing conversation.

This year there is everything from a puppet piece inspired by Lorca from Erin ORr and Rima Fand to Toni Dove’s high-tech robot/video/music/new media spectacle Lucid Possession to a new dance piece by Laura Peterson called Wooden to what I assume will be some surreal spoken word type performance from Deke Weaver.

It looks exciting and Culturebot encourages you to take some time and check it out. You can learn more about the festival at HERE’s website or you can go by HERE and pick up a brochure.