Join us for a dance performance for Toolbox @ Twenty followed by a conversation with artist, Edra Soto and choreographer Carrie Hanson!

Experimental dance troupe, The Seldoms reinvigorate their program by partnering with visual artists to create unique multidisciplinary art installations that are activated by choreographed bodies. Titled Toolbox, the program pairs a dance artist with another creative practitioner to collaborate on a new combined work and share their processes, techniques and values with one another. From this conversation, the dancemaker identifies one essential word that undergirds the visual artist’s practice, and translates it to a choreographic one.

This performative installation and exhibition marks the Seldoms’ twentieth year of performance in Chicago. The dancer/ artist pairings include Damon Green/Sadie Woods, Sarah Gonsiorowski/Jacqueline Surdell, Carrie Hanson/Edra Soto, and Maggie Vannucci and Dee Alaba/Jackie Kazarian. This exhibition is curated and choreographed by Carrie Hanson, Director of the Seldoms in collaboration with Allison Peters Quinn, Director of Exhibitions at Hyde Park Art Center.

About Edra Soto:

Puerto Rican born, Edra Soto is an interdisciplinary artist and co-director of the outdoor project space The Franklin. Recent venues presenting Soto’s work include El Museo del Barrio; Luis De Jesus Los Angeles and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago. Soto has attended residency programs at Art Omi and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency among others. Soto was awarded the inaugural Foundwork Artist Prize, the MacArthur Foundation’s International Connections Fund and the Joan Mitchell Foundation grant among others. Soto holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a bachelor’s degree from Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño de Puerto Rico.

About Carrie Hanson:

Carrie Hanson is a dance artist, producer, and educator. Her work involves research and embodiment of social, political, environmental issues and history, as a mode of pressing performance to speak to larger public concerns. Collaboration with creatives and scholars fuels her artistry; most recently she has worked with and learned from visual artist Faheem Majeed in several projects addressing remembrance, acknowledgment, and legacy. Earlier this fall, she enjoyed a residency at Trillium Arts in North Carolina as an ACE Fellow, and in Fall 2019, she was the Interdisciplinary Artist-in-Residence with the Division of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. . In 2015, Hanson was named Chicago Tribune’s “Chicagoan of the Year in Dance”, honored for her political, issue-oriented dance theater and “brawny, brainy movement”. Hanson has received commissions from Texas Performing Arts, the Morton Arboretum, and the National Theater of Mannheim, Germany. Time Out Chicago called her work in an outdoor pool, Giant Fix, one of the “best dance moments of the past decade”. Hanson has been a resident artist at the National Center for Choreography at Akron, and the recipient of a Chicago Dancemaker’s Forum Lab Artists award, two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, and a Ruth Page Award for Dance Performance. She teaches at The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago, holds a BFA from Texas Christian University, and an MA in Dance Studies from Laban London.

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/toolbox-dance-performance-by-the-seldoms-and-conversation-with-edra-soto-tickets-389727213587