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Mary
Armentrout Fridays & Saturdays, May 10, 11, 17 & 18, 8 PM Known for her experiments on the edge of hybrid dance-theater fusion, choreographer-in-residence Mary Armentrout presents her latest performance installation, Blue Sofa. In an ever-changing environment of suburban furniture, supermarket items and frozen fragmentary images of other people, Armentrout employs her trademark minimalist fusion of dance and theater to deconstruct the inner life of contemporary American materialist culture. Five characters are caught under the microscope of her gaze, trying to figure out why their perfect, IKEA furnished, Oreo and Wonderbread filled lives don’t seem to be giving them what they want. As they scratch the surface of their shiny world, flail and crash, and connect and disconnect with each other, deeper aspects of what it is to be human come into focus. Mary Armentrout is a choreographer whose work lives at the edge
of dance, theater, and object art. Her quirky, edgy, hilarious but
deeply inquisitive works draw an audience to examine deeper layers
of simple everyday occurrences. Her work has been presented in both
the Women's Work Festival at Venue 9 and Fellow Travelers'
Women on the Edge Series. Her work has also been featured
on the San Francisco TV program House of Dance and the WB20
Ten O'clock News and has received support from the Zellerbach
Family Fund and the CA$H Grant program. “A newcomer to Mary Armentrout’s work might conclude
that she is, to put it mildly, out there. I can attest to the fact
that while Armentrout is out there, she knows what she’s doing.”
– Sima Belmar, The Guardian.
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