After 3 years, 2 administrations, 2 Cairo visits, 3 Chicago visits (from Cairo) and a slew of short but intense residencies at UIUC, UIC, Hyde Park Art Center, Bates College, High Concept Labs, and with support from Bates Dance Festival, MacArthur Foundation, the US Embassy in Cairo, DCASE, not to mention the amazing Ellyzabeth Adler and Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble, we are finally presenting Mycelial:  Street Parliament at Hyde Park Art Center.  This piece became extremely personal for all of us as we forged close friendships with our Egyptian Collaborators but also became an extremely urgent work as the need to organize and stand up for our values in the US became more and more apparent over the last two years.  This work is another “technopera” in that it involves multi-media elements as central characters of story telling with the human voice  playing an important role but it also involves audience interactions with cell phones, body tracking technologies, and a sound and video score that was created from a direct emotional analysis of the #egypt twitter feed.  It is a lot to take in at once, and I was dubious for long parts of the process about how everything was going to integrate as a piece, but after our premier at the Bates Dance Festival last week then entire work came into focus and despite the plethora of different technologies and techniques involved, the work for me now flows as a singular vision.  Congratulations to the whole team including Ahmed Saleh (my Egyptian Counterpart), Hugh Sato who was really the glue that allowed all of the interactive elements to work together, John Toenjes and Tony Reimer who deveoloped the Cell Phone App “MoSho” through which we are sending prompts to the phones, Liviu Pasare who designed the magical visual environment, Josh-Paul Weckesser who created the lighting design, The dancers who will be performing (Silvita Diaz Brown, Ezzat Ismail Ezzat, Mounir Saeed, Shaymaa Shoukry) and some who you will not see but whose bodies built the piece including Christopher Knowlton, Nejla Yatkin, and Carlos Lopez.  Lastly, I want to say a big congratulations to my friend and collaborator Erica Mott whose vision has led us to this moment through the fog.  Our premier at the Bates Dance Festival was a testament to her genius.  I am supremely proud of this work and hope to see you there!

The show runs one more weekend

July 19-21st at 7 PM