Proteo Media + Performance's SEPARATE OCEANS Premieres At Theaterlab Today-20

Separate Oceans, a new evening-length performance work produced by Proteo Media + Performance and choreographed by Kathleen Kelley, makes its premiere January 18-20th at Theaterlab as a part of the TLAB Shares program. Making parallels between digital spaces and the rhythms of the natural world, Separate Oceans examines virtual systems of emotion and affect. It incorporates dancing, live video feed, and projections that all draw inspiration from the ways humans increasingly depend on digital systems for desire and fulfillment. Separate Oceans features collaborators/performers Bree Breeden, Jennifer Campbell, Maddie Schimmel, and Lauren Vermilion supported by lighting designer Amanda K. Ringger, costume designer Maddie Schimmel, and projections designed by Proteo Media.

Proteo Media has been developing Separate Oceans for the past year with residency support by Chez Bushwick/Jonah Bokaer Artist-in-Residence program and a works-in-progress performance with the South Mountain Conservancy. The evening-length work will utilize live feed video streamed from iPhones, simulating the ways we live online (such as Snapchat, FaceTime, and Instagram), and will feature projection designs that evoke the increasing separation between the natural and digital worlds. These images are overlaid on a movement vocabulary that echoes the rhythms and structures of natural systems such as ocean wave patterns, animal movements, and cellular movement and division.

Separate Oceans evokes a specifically queer understanding of futurity by drawing connections between the natural and the virtual worlds. It explores the apparent emotional disconnect between beings in face-to-face communication as the dominant method of contact nowadays occurs via the phone screen. The ways our bodies connect to each other in this world has changed, especially due to the isolation, rage, and fear evoked by the current political landscape and the hope (and despair) of digital spaces. As culture moves towards affective computing and digitized emotional realities, our bodies are becoming enmeshed with computational algorithms to create feedback loops between ourselves and our virtual systems. "Likes", hearts, pictures, texts, stories, and comments can create a rich digital container for connection, but often at the expense of physical or embodied experiences or a sense of physical belonging. Kelley says, "I am interested in what this idea of digital affect does to the body's lived experiences. How can we create meaning from the body when we escape it so often?"

The rehearsal process has been a collaboration between director and dancers as the artists have focused on developing studio practices that can allow space for each dancer's individual physical perspectives and can ground the conceptual ideas into physical action. Kelley pushes her creative work to embody rather than represent, and is interested in work that is grounded in the real but "adds intensity, intention, and investment to the neutral indifference of the real" (Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics and Art).

Come to Theaterlab at 357 West 36th Street 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10018 to experience an immersive digital reality as told through movement and projections by Proteo Media. Shows are January 18th and 19th at 8 pm, and January 20th at 3 pm. Tickets are $20 general and $18 for students and seniors, and available for purchase here: web.ovationtix.com/trs/pe.c/10357241.

About Proteo Media + Performance

Proteo Media + Performance produces creative experiences that engage live performers, film, projections, installations and other forms of visual/digital data. Headed by Kathleen Kelley, our work explores rich intersections between technology and the body. We serve as digital collaborators, videographers, and producers for innovative artists, including recent work with Janessa Clark, Jose Riviera, Jr, and Roxy Gordon. In our own creative practice, we have recently produced an interactive exhibition at the Gowanus Loft, and other recent live works have shown at Chez Bushwick, Movement Research at the Judson Church, the Center for Performance Research, Triskelion Arts, Green Space, the SOAK Festival, the CURRENT SESSIONS, Nimbus OFFLINE series, and HATCH series. Recent videos have shown in TriQuarterly Literary Journal, Philly FringeArts Digital Fringe Festival, Moving Poems blog, Small Po[r]tions Intermedia Literary Journal, and the Rutgers University Momentum Technology Videos Festival.

About Kathleen Kelley

Kathleen Kelley is an Associate Professor of Dance and Technology at Montclair State University and the Artistic Director Proteo Media + Performance. She was a Chez Bushwick Artist in Residence in 2018, and a 2015-2016 LEIMAY Fellow. Recent performances include Chez Bushwick, Movement Research at the Judson, the interactive installation Digitized Figures at Gowanus Loft, a commissioned premiere in the Split Bill Series at Triskelion Arts, and showcase performances in the SOAK Festival, the CURRENT SESSIONS, Nimbus OFFLINE choreography series, and HATCH series. Her collaboration with the poet Sarah Rose Nordgren (under the moniker Smart Snow) has recently published a video work in Triquarterly literary magazine and shown work in multiple literary and dance online journals. As a scholar, she serves on the Editorial Board of Dance Education in Practice, a journal published by the National Dance Education Organization. She has a BFA from the University of NC-Greensboro and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

About Bree Breeden

Bree Breeden received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance Performance and Choreography from Montclair State in 2016 where she performed works by Bill T.Jones, Jose Limon, Larry Keigwin, and Martha Graham. Currently, she is a dancer and the Managing Director for Proteo Media + Performance, dances with VON HOWARD PROJECT and Michiyaya DANCE. Previously she was the Operations Associate at Movement Research and Production Manager for Sidra Bell Dance New York. She also choreographs and performs her own work which has been presented at Embodied Spaces Festival in 2018, Movement Research Fall Festival at Danspace in 2018, at Earl Mosley Institute of the Arts dance talk series in 2016, and Montclair State University in 2015 in Danceworks and ACDFA.

About Jennifer Campbell

Jennifer Campbell is a Montclair State University alumna where she presented her own choreographic works and received her BFA in Dance. Jennifer has performed in works by Fredrick Earl Mosley, Kathleen Kelley, Pat Graney, Martha Graham, and José Limón.

About Maddie Schimmel

Maddie Schimmel has performed in work by Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Reiner, Jeremy Nelson and Luis Lara Malvacias, Doug LeCours, and Netta Yerushalmy. Her choreographic work has been presented at Triskelion Arts, Dixon Place, ROULETTE Intermedium, Alchemical Studios, Cathy Weis' Sundays on Broadway, and the NYU Tisch Dance Jack Crystal Theatre. She has also designed costumes for Jessie Young, Roxy + Company, and herself.

About Lauren Vermilion

Lauren Vermilion has worked with Tere O'Connor, Nico Brown, Renée Archibald, Renée Wadleigh, and Sahar Azimi. She has spent multiple seasons working for the American Dance Festival, and she holds a BFA in Dance with a minor in Mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

About Amana K. Ringger

Amanda K. Ringger has lived in New York since 1997 designing locally, nationally and internationally with artists such as Darrah Carr, Faye Driscoll, Julian Barnett, Deborah Lohse, Laura Peterson, Cynthia Oliver, Alexandra Beller, Katie Workum, Doorknob Company, Shannon Gillen, Kota Yamazaki, and Mark Jarecke, among others. She received a BA from Goucher College in Baltimore, MD and an MFA in lighting design from Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. She is the recipient of a 2009 Bessie award for her collaboration on Faye Driscoll's 837 Venice Boulevard.

About Theaterlab and TLAB SHARES Program

Theaterlab is an artistic laboratory dedicated to research into the nature of live performance. Through the development of new and experimental work, including theater, music, and visual arts, Theaterlab supports New York City's diverse community of artists as well as the general public interested in seeing emerging new work. Theaterlab also focuses on audience development as a creative project. We regard the theatrical experience as a creative public assembly with the audience as an important partner in fulfilling our mission. In addition to producing and presenting new work, Theaterlab provides affordable space for rehearsal and project development, including resident and affiliate artists programs.

TLAB SHARES invites guest artists to produce their work in our space at affordable rates. Theaterlab reviews and selects all TLAB SHARES artists based on the Company's compatibility with Theaterlab's mission and aesthetic, a proven history of artistically and aesthetically ambitious productions, and a vision for utilizing our white box Theater in a way that supports and elevates their work.