| Radioactive Practice . . . reveals something about what happens when an athletic act becomes a spiritual one.” —New York Times, “Best Dance Performances of 2022”
MINNEAPOLIS, APRIL 24, 2024—Choreographer Abby Zbikowski presents a rigorous, highly physical, often ecstatic dance work in intimate, onstage seating. This Bessie Award–winning choreographer and her company members (performers with wide-ranging movement backgrounds, including postmodern dance, synchronized swimming, African forms, and martial arts, among others) collaborate with Senegalese dance artist Momar Ndiaye to develop a complex, demanding, and perplexing physicality that confronts expectations and dives into the unknown. Radioactive Practice gives the audience an up-close view of the dancers, shattering assumptions about established forms while testing their physical and mental limits.
Abby Z and the New Utility: Radioactive Practice
Wednesday, May 15–Saturday, May 18, 8 pm
$35 ($28 Walker members). No additional fees.
McGuire Theater
ABOUT ABBY ZBIKOWSKI
Abby Zbikowski (she/her) is a choreographer creating contemporary dance works that pay homage to the effort of living, tactics of survival, and the aesthetics produced as a result, utilizing the physical aspects and psyche-emotional experience of her rigorous training in African and Afro-diasporic forms, playing sports, and performing manual labor. She founded Abby Z and the New Utility in 2012 and received the 2017 Juried Bessie Award for her “unique and utterly authentic movement vocabulary in complex and demanding structures to create works of great energy, intensity, surprise, and danger.” In 2018 she received a “Choreographer of the Future” commission from Dance Umbrella UK and in 2020 a United States Artists Fellowship. She is an inaugural Caroline Hearst choreographer-in-residence at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, currently artist-in-residence at New York Live Arts, and formerly at Bates Dance Festival, American Dance Festival, and the STREB Lab for Action Mechanics. She is currently an Associate Professor of Dance at Ohio State University, formerly at the University of Illinois, and on faculty at the American Dance Festival. She has taught at the Academy of Culture in Riga, Latvia; at Festival Un Pas Vers L’Avant in Abidjan, Ivory Coast; and studied at Germaine Acogny’s L’École des Sables in Senegal. Zbikowski has created commissioned work for the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company and numerous universities throughout the country.
ABOUT ABBY Z AND THE NEW UTILITY
Choreographer Abby Zbikowski created Abby Z and the New Utility in 2012 with dancers Fiona Lundie and Jennifer Meckley to experiment with the potential and choreographic possibility of the body being pushed beyond perceived limits, creating a new movement lexicon that triangulates dancing/moving bodies across multiple cultural value systems simultaneously. In 2016, Abby expanded to a group of nine performer/collaborators for Zbikowski’s first evening length commission. abandoned playground premiered to a sold-out run at the Abrons Arts Center in New York in April 2017, leading to Zbikowski being honored with the Juried Bessie Award. Abby Z and the New Utility have been presented at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, the Boston ICA, 92nd St Y, Movement Research at Danspace Project, Gibney Dance Center, the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, and the Fusebox Festival in Austin, TX, among others. From diverse training and cultural backgrounds, Abby Z and the New Utility works collaboratively to build a hybrid form that welcomes audiences from a range of understandings of dance/movement and reflects a wider contemporary cultural conversation. |
