Avant-Garde-Arama Rises Again

Charles Dennis Productions announces the presentation of Avant-Garde-Arama Rises Again, a festival of short works of dance, film, music and performance art that will be presented Friday and Saturday October 27-28 at 6pm at the Lace Mill, 165 Cornell Street in Kingston, NY. Suggested admission is $20. Attendees can pay what they can afford. Parking is available on Manor Avenue and Progress Street. For further information call 917-673-9023 or email [email protected].

Avant-Garde-Arama was originally created in 1980 by performance artist Charles Dennis and musician/visual artist Jeffrey Isaac at the legendary East Village, Manhattan venue Performance Space 122 (P.S. 122) now Performance Space New York. Producer Charles Dennis was a co-founder of P.S. 122 and presented his critically acclaimed inter-disciplinary dance, performance art and video in that space for over 40 years.

In 2019 Charles Dennis moved from Brooklyn, NY to Hurley, NY and began searching for opportunities to present avant-garde, experimental works in the Hudson Valley. During the summer of 2021 he curated and produced 2 Avant-Garde-Arama Programs in Woodstock NY and for the past 3 years has been presenting the festival at The Lace Mill in Kingston, NY.

The Lace Mill is an anchor of the Ulster County arts community. Built in 1903, the US Lace Curtain Mill employed hundreds of Kingstonians – particularly women – over several generations. RUPCO purchased it in late 2013. The building currently houses 55 affordable apartments with a preference for artists. The building offers several gallery spaces and designated shared and private work studios.

Avant-Garde-Arama Rises Again at The Lace Mill offers a smorgasbord of short works in an informal, cabaret setting hosted by Charles Dennis.

Avant-Garde-Arama Host/Producer Charles Dennis

For Ukuleles Unleashed/Avant Garde A Rama (Kingston) Bob Goldberg / Famous Accordions of the Universe will offer “Bears, Trees and Other Living Things”. Composer/multi-instrumentalist Bob Goldberg leads an ensemble of accordions, ukuleles and harp, performing new music that envelopes the audience with sustained textures, haunting melodies, folk tunes and group improvisation. The music was inspired by the landscape and history of the Hudson Valley, paying tribute to the plants, animals and possibly one random historic figure. The Famous Accordions have performed at local venues including The Local and Opus 40 in Saugerties. Accordions: Bob Goldberg Brian Dewan Ryder Cooley Ukuleles: Carmen Borgia Jeanie Douglas Jerry Curtis Jerelynn Mason Rich Keyes (bass uke) Harp: Julia Haines.

Drummer/percussionist David Van Tieghem will offer one of his signature, improvised percussion pieces.

Defacto Dance will perform Lovely Day, a dance for 3 dancers - Meg Fry, Lee Shapley and Sydney Allen - structured alongside the beautiful pop song by the same name by Bill Withers. It's an improvised piece with a very specific structure. Its foundational structure is a Walking Dance (originally a Richard Bull structure which De Facto has honored and developed), where the dancers work with simple compositional ideas such as near and far space, spatial pathway, posture/facing, cardinal spatial arrangements, and theme and variation.

Choreographer/Filmmaker Charles Dennis will present 2 short films "After Rush Hour" (2009) and We Are The Dinosaur (2005)

Pop-Up Office of Kindness – an interactive performance/installation by Jean E. Taylor. Whimsy as a remedy for life’s daily dilemmas. The Office of Kindness is open. And we are hiring. We ask for at least 6 months experience being kind. Our Director will be on hand at the Arama to share qualifications for the outreach position. During the break, take our short Are You Kind? Quiz and earn an Official Hand-Stamped Credential.

Canadian Gothic is loosely inspired by the famous painting ‘American Gothic’. Tom Brouillette’s choreography features a vocabulary of movement that has its origins in the movement of work. There are also riffs on country dancing and an exploration of the joy, fear and terror inherent in country life. Larry Lewis’ banjo by turns both traditional and futuristic provides the musical backdrop for Canadian Gothic. Performed by Tom Brouillette & Phylis Whyte with Larry Lewis.

Storyteller Zelda aka Judith Z. Miller performs her true story Zhabu Goes to Federal Pr*son. It’s 1982 during a 6-week theatre residency at a Federal Women’s Penitentiary in West Virginia — no place for a Queer Jew with a Great Dane named “Zhabu” who does the unthinkable. Adventure! Intrigue! Guns!

Artist Bios

Composer/multi-instrumentalist Bob Goldberg leads an ensemble of accordions, ukuleles and harp, performing new music that envelopes the audience with sustained textures, haunting melodies, folk tunes and group improvisation. The Famous Accordions have performed at local venues including The Local and Opus 40 in Saugerties, and Basilica's 24-Hour Drone, and will be appearing next month at the O Positive Festival in Kingston. Bob Goldberg has performed in previous editions of Avant Garde a Rama as a member of the post-modern jug band, Washboard Jungle.

DeFacto Dance is led by co-founder Meg Fry . De Facto has performed in curated and self-produced shows in the NY Fringe, Philly Fringe, DIA, Judson Church, Here Art Center, and many others. Favorite pieces include Cinderzilla, Show This Room, a dancer is a person is a dancer is a person, and Into the Wild. She danced with the Richard Bull Dance Theatre in the 90s, and Richard's work remains a formative influence. Most recently she created site-specific pieces in Jackson Heights Travers Park for several summers in a row, including Hunt and Dash and Everyone, for about a dozen dancers. These pieces delighted in happenstance occurrences, like kids on bikes riding in and among the dancers during the performances. Meg is also a certified yoga teacher, and has enjoyed teaching classes in unconventional settings, including family reunions and corporate conferences.

David Van Tieghem is an American composer, percussionist and sound designer, best known for his philosophy of utilizing any available object as a percussion instrument and for his collaborations with the experimenta artists Laurie Anderson, Brian Eno, Steve Reich, Robert Ashley and David Byrne. He lives in New York City and the Hudson Valley. For more info visit https://www.vantieghem.com/

Charles Dennis is an interdisciplinary artist, choreographer, filmmaker and the host/producer of Avant-Garde-Arama. Charles was a member of theater director Robert Wilson’s collective, the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, and went on to perform in many early Wilson works including the original 1976 production of “Einstein on the Beach”. In 1977 Charles began creating his own form of “physical theater”, combining dance, spoken word and visual art and media. Charles co-founded Performance Space 122 in NYC in 1979 and presented his work there for over 25 years. In 2019 Charles moved to Hurley, NY and began to curate and produce arts events through his company Charles Dennis Productions. He also documents live performance on video and has created a collection of short films and documentaries. More info is available at www.charlesdenns.net.

Jean E. Taylor (she/her) is a teaching artist and director for Lincoln Center Education. Jean received LC’s Directors Emeriti Award, and represented LCE at the International Teaching Artist Conferences (ITAC) in Oslo, Brisbane, Edinburgh, New York, and Seoul. Jean teaches Theatrical Clown and Accepting the Ridiculous for The New School’s College of Performing Arts and teaches Theatrical Clown/A Level of Theatre for The Barrow Group. As a performer, Jean is developing Great Small Moments and dreams of using her vintage tractor for Movable Stories along a country road. Jean piloted an Intergenerational Co-Mentoring project, with co-mentor Zoey Peacock Jones. They celebrate being experts and newcomers simultaneously.

Jill Burton " brings her voice and physical form as the two main tools of her trade. Her bio includes training in ballet and classical music at an early age, while having quickly developed an affinity for improvising in performance. Ms. Burton was a witness and participant in the profound cultural and interdisciplinary possibilities of the 1980′s arts renaissance that blossomed out of the then near-apocalyptic urban collapse and wholly non-commercial NYC/Lower East Side scene. While many musicians come from that same NYC/LES arts scene, few could add something as inverted a seminal experience as Burton’s six years as musical accompanist for Pacific Northwestern Tlingit tribe storytellers in Sitka, Alaska...Burton’s improvised works manifest most often in wordless vocals, seemingly constructing invisible sonic architecture, both bordering the interior of a venue and transforming those same borders into transducers carrying vibrations."--Matt Gorney

"What a great musician/performer. Jill Burton!...In command of all the dimensions of her art…master/mistress? Shaman? Giant? Wizard? Witch? Rock Star? Those terms come with baggage but I’d say she’s definitely a witch, in all the ways that word connotes power and having the ability to summon forces and transform reality...her performing is compelling, deep, transportive, all kinds of funny, and super attentive to the present—space, people, acoustics... She makes the world a more open place..."--Andrew Drury, Continuum Culture and Arts.

Host or Publisher Charles Dennis Productions