A shared evening of dance featuring Rosy Simas performing We Wait In The Darkness and Deborah Jinza Thayer’s All Hail the Queen will take place Tuesday, May 24th at 7 PM in the Weitz Center Theater.
Jinza Thayer, who grew up in Burma and Japan, discovered dance during her time as a med-school student at Johns Hopkins. Her work reflects the Buddhist principle that individual’s inner life is reflected in the environment; hence, my fascination with creating structured environments as a way to probe one’s internal world. Jinza Thayer uses large abstract props to create altered metaphorical spaces that the dancers must navigate in the same way we are limited or guided by our own mental models. By rendering these models visible and concrete on stage, Jinza Thayer is able to inspire awareness of, and reflection on, how we interpret and express being in the world. She calls her choreographic work “Movement Architecture, because her it draws the viewer into a meditative state evoked by the scenic “atmosphere” and sustained or intensified through movement.
Similarly, Minneapolis based choreographer and dancer Rosy Simas’ approach to dance making is multi-faceted: She designs environments for performance using sound, textiles, film, and paper that set the scene for her sensorial, intentional, and gestural movements. Simas’ choreography is inspired by the history, ancestry, and culture that are stored in the body. Simas’ dance work investigates how culture, history, home, and identity are stored in the body and can be expressed in movement.
Jinza Thayer will share a work-in-progress performance All Hail the Queen, which celebrates the vagina and humorously pushes against a phallic-centered packaging of the female experience. Both sung and danced, this commentary uses the ammunition provided by the culture and rams it into a nutribullet. It will feature performances by Non Edwards, Missa Kes, Sharon Picasso, and Taylor Shevey, lyrics written by Melissa Birch, and collaboration with visual artist Amelia Biewald.
Simas will be presenting her critically acclaimed and award winning solo We Wait In The Darkness, a performance work of displacement and homecoming, fueled by the stories of the Seneca women of Simas’ family. We Wait In The Darkness is performed within an environment of film, a paper set, and an original surround sound music composition performed by French contemporary music composer French François Richomme, and according to Start Tribune’s Caroline palmer, is “a generous and personal work on many levels — it’s as if Simas has flung open the door to her subconscious and invited the audience inside to have a look around.” City Pages’ Sheila Regan praises Simas for her “ability to suffuse the smallest movements, or even complete motionlessness, with a captivating aura.”