Join us at Play House for two works-in-progress by Biba Bell and Danielle Ross.

Friday, October 25th
Play House (12657 Moran St.)
7pm, Free (donations to Play House accepted)

Danielle Ross
You Are Not Alone

You Are Not Alone is a meditation on how bodies in motion soak up the architectures - people, pasts, materials, sonic vibrations, weather patterns - we move with and amongst; it explores the performing body as a momentary collector: one passing through rather than taking captive. Generated from my own research on forms of searching, liminality, and carriage of those “lost,” You Are Not Aloneplays with performance as an affective form and seeks a porous, relational body. Can I practice this relational body in performance as a move against the colonial? Can I remain both able to be saturated andavailable for blurring into those sites and witnesses around me? This “solo” has been generated anew at each site it has resided in based on the architectures, histories, and collaborators gifted by the space. It has been performed at Northwestern University, Research Project (Chicago), and Roman Susan Gallery (Chicago). Its lineage has been shifted by the presence of Mike Treffehn, Pepe Álvarez Colon, and Tuli Bera.

Danielle Ross is a performance maker, curator, dancer, and scholar. She is on the board of the Creative Music Guild, co-curated the seriesPure Surfaceand is co-founder of FRONT, a newspaper dedicated to dance and performance. She has worked with Linda Austin, Ayako Kato, Bouchra Ouizguen, Zoe|Juniper, Lu Yim, Ginger Krebs, and others. Ross is a graduate student in Northwestern’s Performance Studies program. Her work explores corporeal practices that historicize women’s histories marked by erasure.


Biba Bell
excavating the room

excavating the room began with a reoccurring dream I've had since childhood, and has turned into an inquiry about the where of artistic labor as a kind of memory work and the architectures in which this labor takes up residence. It is about how my body fits into temporal structures that act like live dermal archives of family, past, and conceptions of home. It is about how these structures become a place to commune and share. It is about dwelling in the gaps of openings between the known and the unknown of the past. excavating the room is an iterative performance. Collaborators include Norman Douglas (words) and Alexander Buzzalini (scenic), and draws further inspiration from the writings of artists Madeline Gins and Arakawa. excavating the room is also connected to an essay of the same name soon to be published in Movement Research Performance Journal.

Biba Bell (b. 1976, Sebastopol) is a dancer, choreographer and writer based in Detroit. Her performance work has been traveled to France, Russia, Germany, Italy, Canada, and across the U.S., Often set in unconventional venues, it focuses on dance’s social dimensions and mise en scene alongside questions of domesticity and affective labor. She has performed with Maria Hassabi and Walter Dundervill and was a founding member of Modern Garage Movement (2005-2011). Bell earned her Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University and is currently an Assistant Professor in Dance at Wayne State University. Of her dancing the New York Times writes "It’s invigorating to watch someone who borders on wild."