Dancers:
Jessica Cook
Katie Dean
Ayano Elson
Read Jessica’s Spotlight Q+A with Roulette here.
Dog Flats sees three women using objects, materials, and movement patterns to create a live multi-layered sound score amidst personal investigation to architecture, work/labor, disaster, and historic iconography. Performers Katie Dean, Ayano Elson, and Jessica Cook obscure and expand audience sight line to alter the perceiving of sound and its relationship to movement. Rhythmic patterns are systematically built and deconstructed to amplify and ornament gesture and shape. The performers traverse through rigid dance constructs cut with improvisational scores centered around memory, desire, and hyper-emotion. Sculptural landscaping and transformation produce sonic textures that are threaded and perpetuated alongside Lillie De‘s light design.
Jessica Cook is a Brooklyn-based multi-disciplinary artist originally from Durham, NC She graduated from SUNY Purchase in 2005 with a BFA in modern dance performance. She has performed her work in Judson Memorial Church, New Museum, Spring Break Art Fair, Westway, Pieter Performance Space in LA, and others. Cook has performed in New York City for 12 years, most recently with Milka Djordjevich/Chris Peck, Kim Brandt, Phoebe Berglund, and Laurel Atwell, and frequently on Roulette’s stage.
Katie Dean is a performer and designer originally from Harrisonburg, Virginia. She has performed in New York with visual artists and choreographers Xavier Cha, Jennifer Harge, Megan Harrold/Inimois Dance, Ivy Baldwin Dance, Sam Kim, Julie Mayo, Melanie McLain, Hannah Walsh, and Rebekah Windmiller, in collaborative work with Heather Bregman, Jake Dibeler, and Alaina Stamatis, and in a video by Mia Lidofsky and Celia Rowlson-Hall. Dean is currently in process with Phoebe Berglund, Kim Brandt, Jessica Cook, Shannon Hummel/Cora Dance, and Nadia Tykulsker.
Ayano Elson is a choreographer and designer. She was born in Okinawa, Japan and is a 2018 Movement Research Van Lier Emerging Artist of Color Fellow. Her work has been presented by Center for Performance Research, Gibney Dance (Work Up), Movement Research at Judson Memorial Church, Roulette (lec/dem), and AUNTS at Arts@Renaissance, Mount Tremper Arts, and New Museum. As a dancer, Ayano has had the pleasure to perform in works by artists Bell + Clixby, Phoebe Berglund, Kim Brandt, Jessica Cook, devynn emory, and Steven Reker in places like BAAD!, BRIC, CATCH at the Invisible Dog, the Guggenheim Museum, the Kitchen, Lincoln Center, MoMA PS1, Movement Research at Judson Memorial Church, New Museum, PS122, Pioneer Works, Roulette, and SculptureCenter.
Jessica Cook: Dog Flats is supported, in part, by the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts.
Our ongoing [DANCEROULETTE] series reflects our commitment to presenting experimental dance that we’ve held since our founding in 1978, particularly in regards to the collaborative efforts of composers and choreographers exploring the relationship between sound and movement, choreography and composition. Roulette’s move to Brooklyn in September 2011 has enabled us to initiate a regular season of [DANCEROULETTE] presentations, which now hosts between 20 and 30 performances yearly.
