This hour-long piece continues gloATL’s efforts to interrogate and re-invent public spaces through nomadic experiments in contemporary performance. The new work extends gloATL’s fervent collaborative reach into the community by bringing together contemporary dance, film, machines and the sport of skateboarding. The work marks the first collaboration between Atlanta filmmaker Micah Stansell and glo dancemaker Lauri Stallings, with underwater filming and precarious aesthetics playing a prominent role in the new creation. The skateboarders of the park and experts of Sunbelt Rental Co. also will play an integral role.
This project investigates the historic role of public recreation centers in reflecting and reconstituting our communal experience. glo’s Stallings said, “I remember walking into the recreation centers growing up. It’s there I learned that perhaps to capture a city in an image is to really follow its movement. I think artists today are the ideal navigators in what history has shown to be often precarious waters.”
“Lauri and Micah have brought an inspiring human intimacy to extraordinary, large-scale art projects that have transformed our city’s public spaces into places for community,” said Possible Futures founder Louis Corrigan. “This project continues to explore that possibility by focusing on one of the city’s most dynamic new parks created by the BeltLine’s transformational development while noting the fraught history of Atlanta’s public parks.”
This event is free and open to the public, but seating is limited. Possible Futures commissioned this project. Various additional forms of support have been provided by Sunbelt, the Atlanta BeltLine Inc., and the City of Atlanta.
Possible Futures is also sponsoring a related lecture entitled “Race and Public Space in Atlanta: Desegregation, White Flight, and their Aftermath” by historian Kevin Kruse, author of White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. Kruse’s talks will take place Saturday May 12 at 11am at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (535 Means St. NW, Atlanta, GA 303018). The lecture is also free and open to the public.
Performance Location--just off the BeltLine north of Parish and the Freedom Park overpass.
Old 4th Ward Skatepark
830 Willoughby Way
Atlanta, GA 30312
About gloATL
gloATL is a collaborative platform of exceptional contemporary physical experience, whose mission is to create immersive art through live performance, public works, and a choreographic schoolhouse. gloATL’s work features a synergy between art forms, blending classical elements with the complexity and groove of today’s rhythmic culture. Part choreography and part interactive art installation, glo performances regularly bridge the gap between artists and audience to explore fundamentals found in philosophies of relational aesthetics, such as being together, voluntary migration, and the “inter” human.
Since its inaugural work “rapt” on the campus of the Woodruff Arts Center in July 2009, over 60,000 Atlantans of all ages, races and creeds have experienced gloATL performances, an uncanny figure for an emerging organization. gloATL has been named “Best Dance Company” by Creative Loafing every year of its existence. glo dancemaker Lauri Stallings, an alum of Hubbard St. Dance Chicago, was recently nominated for the 2012 Rome Prize in reflection of her work with gloATL. For more, go to www.gloATL.com.
About Micah Stansell
Micah is an Atlanta-based video/filmmaker and installation artist. He received an MFA in Digital Filmmaking and the Arts from Georgia State University. His work has screened in galleries and film festivals across the Unites States and internationally. Stansell has received several awards for his work, most recently an Artadia Award (2011), a Working Artist Project Award (2010) from the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, a Special Jury Prize for Innovative Filmmaking at the Atlanta Film Festival (2009), and a Student Academy Award Nomination for his graduate work (2008). Micah and Whitney Stansell’s monumental five-channel video projection “Between You and Me” was featured at FLUX 2010. Stansell's work has been reviewed in numerous publications, including Art in America, MovieMaker, Atlanta Art Now’s Noplacencessbook and The Atlanta Journal Constitution. For more, seewww.micahstansell.com.
