ASIMINACHREMOSBONNIEJONES

In The Mock Turtle’s Academy in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s’ Adventures in Wonderland, a course was taught in “Reeling, Writhing and Fainting in Coils.” This was Carroll’s way of poking fun of the staples of education for young girls in well-to-do families of Victorian England: Reading, writing, and painting in oils. In their collaborative performance work, dancer Asimina Chremos and sound/text artist Bonnie Jones conduct a similarly unlikely English lesson for the 21st century. Pages become screens on which live, improvised writing is projected. Reading and writing are intertwined and come alive for audience and performer. The canvas is a body and sound the paint transforming the space in which that body moves. Chremos and Jones offer audience members a space in which they can “read” a confluence of movement, text, and sound. A book of the future where changing lines of an illuminated text are stretched and displaced by a dancing body that “writhes” in the space between projector lamp and the wall/screen.