“(home)Body“
Cid Pearlman in collaboration with Mara Milam & Denise Leto
Video Installation (27 minutes), USA premiere 2022
What does it feel like to be at home in your body? How are experiences of home embodied across intersections of identities and expressions?
(home)Body invokes complex relationships between embodiment and place. With a multiplicity of voices, dancers, and poetic imaginaries, the work speaks to ideas centering home and body through personal, experimental, and topical approaches. The films involve site-specific and immersive environments both natural and built. Spaces and bodies interact in a collaborative and choreographic conversation.
(home)Body brings together tools for meaning making that director Cid Pearlman (USA) has been working with for a while – dance, poetry, site specific installation, film, limitation, confined spaces, and immersive environments.
The installation is comprised of five short films, and features the work of lead poet/dramaturge Denise Leto, and poets Jerome Ellis, Naomi Ortiz, Willie X. Lin, Tanaya Winder.
(home)Body is Pearlman’s second collaboration with video artist Mara Milam, and was filmed in Santa Cruz, California.
Pearlman first came to Estonia as a Fulbright scholar in 2009, and has returned regularly since then to teach, make art, and visit with friends.
Artistic Director: Cid Pearlman
Choreography: Cid Pearlman in collaboration with the performers
Video Artist: Mara Milam
Lead Poet/Dramaturge: Denise Leto
Jerome Ellis, Naomi Ortiz, Willie X. Lin, Tanaya Winder
Original Sound Scores: Jonathan Segel
Text Animation/Texture Design: Spencer Doughtie
Collaborators: Jesse Bie, Lisa Brenner, Jet Cawiezell, Angela Chambers, Gerald Casel, Julia Daniel, Ana Elizabeth, Kevin Gaytan, Francis Garciá, David King, Collette Kollewe, Cynthia Ling Lee, Micha Scott, Cynthia Strauss, Alex Mannings, Lyndia McGauhey, Lazlo Pearlman, Alex Santana, Reba Thomas
“(home)Body was created with support from the Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship and the Arts Council Santa Cruz County.
For over two decades Cid Pearlman’s choreography has worked to subtly disrupt traditional notions of desire, gender and friendship. Inspired by the resilience, fragility, and resourcefulness of the human body, Pearlman makes dances about how we negotiate being together in a complex world. Among other honors she is the recipient of the 2021 Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship, a Fulbright Award from the US Department of State, and has been twice awarded a Djerassi Resident Artist Fellowship. Her work has been presented at numerous venues including ODC Theater, Joyce SoHo, Kanuti Gildi SAAL (Estonia), the Getty Center, Stockholm City Hall, Theatre Artaud and the Museum of Contemporary Art/San Diego.Pearlman is committed to working with contemporary composers, and past performances have featured collaborations with Joan Jeanrenaud, Jonathan Segel, Albert Mathias, Erling Wold, Haroon Tahir, Kaarel Kõivupuu and Johannes Ahun. In addition to creating dances for her company, Pearlman has choreographed for film, opera and theater.
Pearlman’s choreography has received support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Eesti Kultuurkapital, CA$H, the Rainin Opportunity Fund at ODC Theater, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the San Francisco Art Commission, the Zellerbach Family Fund, the Walter and Elise Haas Fund, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, the American Composers Forum, the Arts Council of Santa Cruz County, and the Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship at the Community Foundation Santa Cruz. Pearlman received a Master of Fine Arts in Dance from UCLA in 2006, holds a Black Belt in Aikido (Nidan), and currently teaches in the Department ofTheater Arts at UC Santa Cruz
Denise Leto is a multidisciplinary poet, essayist, and poet/dance dramaturge. She was awarded an Artist in Residence Fellowship in Poetry at the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference in Erice, Sicily and was the recipient of the Orlando Prize in Poetry. Her cross-genre projects include disability culture work with the international art collective, Olimpias. Her poetry and prose has appeared in Writing the Self-Elegy, from Southern Illinois University Press; About Place: Practices of Hope from The Black Earth Institute; Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Literature and elsewhere. She is the forthcoming featured poet for The Poetry Foundation. In addition, Denise was guest editor of the feminist literary journal Sinister Wisdom: Il Viaggio delle Donne: Italian-American Women Reach Shore. She has recently presented her work at the New Orleans Poetry Festival and the Association of Writers & Writing Programs and co-created the San Francisco Baylands Eco-Poetry Project. Denise wrote the book of poetry for the collaborative dance performance Your Body is Not a Shark, choreographed and directed by Cid Pearlman and featuring composer/cellist Joan Jeanrenaud.
