like a movie I saw once, photo: Warwick Green

Megan Mayer in "like a movie i saw once"
photo:Warwick Green

like a movie I saw once, photo: Warwick Green

Megan Mayer in "like a movie i saw once"

like a movie I saw once, photo: Warwick Green

laurie Van Wieren in a scene from : like a movie i saw once"
photo: Warwick Green

like a movie I saw once, photo: Warwick Green

Anna Shogren & Megan Mayer in "like a movie i saw once"
photo:Warwick Green

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a new work by Laurie Van Wieren in: UNBRANDED, at the Ritz in Minneapolis. April 9-12 , 2008 All shows 8:00 PM (photo: Anna Shogren & Laurie Van Wieren by Warwick Green)

with Performers: Megan Mayer, Anna Shogren, Diana Grasselli, Michelle Kinney, Paula Mann and Laurie Van Wieren ,

" Let’s see…you could say it’s like a story of a videographer who follows an opera singer, an accordion player and 3 dancers around trying to capture their stories…but that’s not quite it. It is about the stage, being on the stage or wanting to be on the stage, it is about copying each other, it is about the gestures of women. It’s also about re-membering.Like trying to re-member a movie I saw once…” LVW



UNBRANDED, a performance event of alternative work by local iconoclasts including Michelle Kinney of Jelloslave, Paula Mann and Steve Paul of Time Track Productions and Charles Campbell, Gülgün Kayim and Sean Kelley-Pegg of Skewed Visions.




Tickets available at the Ritz Box Office or by phone: 612-436-1129
Ritz Theater Box Office
www.ritztheaterfoundation.org
The Ritz Theater is located at 345 13th Avenue NE, Minneapolis MN 55413



Performers bios:

Anna Marie Shogren loves working with Laurie Van Wieren and loves Nicollet Village Video. A product of the University of Minnesota's dance and art programs she has also performed with Karen Sherman, Justin Jones, Morgan Thorson, Chris Schlichting, Sarah Jacobs, and Katie Rose McLaughlin, and has performed in New York, Chicago, Boston, Jacob's Pillow in Massachusetts. Her choreography has been presented at the Bryant Lake Bowl Theater, the Red Eye Theater, the Walker Arts Center, the Old Arizona Theater, and soon in New York as part of the Catch Series. Various weekends this spring and summer she will be performing Trisha Brown's Planes in the Medtronic Gallery at the Walker, gallery sitting at the Soap Factory, and, come July 24-26, will be presenting a piece as part of the Momentum series the Southern, please come.

MEGAN MAYER is a performing artist, choreographer and photographer based in Minneapolis. She makes dances in the kitchen of her northeast apartment and has an ongoing video project dancing in public bathroom stalls (youtube.com/boyscoutgirl). Her choreography has been commissioned by the Minnesota History Center and has premiered at Bryant-Lake Bowl, Walker Art Center and in NYC’s CATCH series. She has had the pleasure of dancing for many talented artists including Laurie Van Wieren, Body Cartography, Hijack, Karen Sherman and Shawn McConneloug. Megan played a monster in the 2007 short film The Birthday Party and also creates photo duets with her television (flickr.com/photos/meganmayer/). With Mark Abel Garcia she is co-directing socktesting which premieres June 2008 in the illustriously gritty Soap Factory. Megan looks forward to performing in San Francisco this summer and celebrating her 40th birthday. mnartists.org/Megan_Mayer

DIANA GRASSELLI has lent her shimmery sound to major recording artists such as Dionne Warwick, Luther Vandross, Cher, John Waite, Bonnie Tyler, Alice Cooper, Belinda Carlysle, Phoebe Snow, G.E. Smith, The Smithereens, Chynna Phillips, Bonnie Spector, Paul Stanley, Desmond Child, Jelloslave, Prudence Johnson and Gary Rue. Ms. Grasselli recorded two albums for Capitol Records with the popular East Coast recording group, Desmond Child and Rouge. Their Top 50 Single, “Our Love Is Insane”, with its funky bass beat and Diana’s soaring lead vocal rocked the air waves and dance floors throughout the East Coast. After a successful national tour and appearances on several contemporary television shows including Saturday Night Live! Diana appeared in the hit Broadway show, Gilda Radner - Live From New York at the Wintergarden Theatre. The show was adapted to film by director, Mike Nichols and titled, Gilda Live! and is a now a regular on The Comedy Channel. She has appeared as a backing vocalist on Late Night with David Letterman and on several film sound tracks, including Disney Pictures, Sister Act. Diana has written hundreds of songs including a gold-selling single in the Far East for Vaze Publishing. As a producer with Chanson D’or Productions, Diana has produced and co-produced her original music in collaboration with Greg Wells, Desmond Child, Marsha Malamet, Eric Borg, Michael Sherwood, Terpsichore and Tony Axtell. Diana offers vocal instruction and coaching in Miami, New York, Los Angeles and Minneapolis.

As a composer, MICHELLE KINNEY has received awards and grants from The Bush Foundation, The Jerome Foundation, McKnight Foundation, NEA/Rockefeller, Harvestworks/Studio Pass, and the American Composers Forum. Her work appears on various compilation recordings including the recent “Sonic Circuits X” from the Innova label.In addition to performing in her own bands (now Jelloslave), Michelle has recorded, performed and toured throughout Europe and the United States with some of the most respected innovators in new music today. Henry Threadgill, Butch Morris, Myra Melford, George Cartwright, Leroy Jenkins, Elliot Sharp, Brandon Ross, Steven Bernstein and Steve Tibbets are among the artists calling on Michelle’s contributions as a cellist. She has also worked extensively in pop music, including many recordings and appearances live and on TV (Tonight Show, Letterman, VHS Storytellers) with Natalie Merchant, several recordings with Sheryl Crow, performance projects with producer Hal Wilner, The Letterman Show with Lou Reed, recording with John Cale, and Richie Havens’ recent release “Wishing Well”.

Since her arrival in the Twin Cities fifteen years ago PAULA MANN has created 35 new works. She is now co-artistic director of TIME TRACK PRODUCTIONS whose mission is to explore the relationship between media and humanity using live performance as a foundation. Mann’s work has been presented by many performance venues both in New York—at Dance Theater Workshop, P.S 122, Danspace, Off Broadway at the Douglass Fairbanks Theater, Movement Research at the Judson Church, and the Lower East Side Dance Festival—and in the Twin Cities, by the Southern Theater, the O’ Shaughnessy Dance Series and the Women of Substance series, The Walker Art Center, and the MN Dance Alliance. Her solo work has been presented throughout the U.S. and Canada. Mann has been recognized with several consecutive awards from the McKnight Foundation, the Jerome Foundation; Meet the Composer, the MN State Arts Board, MRAC Arts Activities and Community Arts, two Sage Cowles Chairs at the University of Minnesota and a Bush Artist Fellowship. 1999 she traveled to Germany to study with DV8 Physical Theater. She is a graduate of New York University and is currently affiliate faculty at the University of Minnesota Department of Theater and Dance.

LAURIE VAN WIEREN has been arranging and rearranging individual’s idiosyncratic movements on and off stage since 1980. She grew up on the west side of Chicago, and attended the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1975 she moved to Mpls where she studied Hanya Holm technique with Nancy Hauser. While working at the Walker Art Center she studied and performed with many visiting artist’s including: Eiko and Koma, Dana Reitz, Deborah Hay, Stuart Sherman, David Gordon and Jonathan Stone. As a solo performer, and with her company, the B-Specifics, she has performed in many venues, including the Walker Art Center, the Southern Theater, O’ Shaughnessy, Dancespace, DTW, First Avenue, and on the Lake of the Isles Skating rink. Laurie is the recipient of fellowships from the McKnight, Jerome, Bush and NEA/Rockefeller foundations. Her solo’s “Anthony" and "Our Lady of Sorrow" were performed in the Art of Movement Festival, Yarolslavl, Russia, Aug 2006. "Antonio" and "Goodbye Mania" were performed at the Fabrik: International Center for Dance and Movement, Potsdam, Germany January 2007. She is the founder and producer of a monthly choreographers showcase and discussion, the “9x22 Dance Lab”, a meeting-place for dancers and dance-makers in Minneapolis. She teaches both privately and a class called “Out of Character” at the University of Minnesota. lvw@visi.com

“…Laurie Van Wieren is a master of the small exquisite movement, deftly employed to compose characters that become indelible in the mind.”
-Camille LeFevre, Minneapolis StarTribune



"Laurie Van Wieren"s “Platform,” ...a Tourettic journey from the front to the back door of the theater, each moment’s pose a separate and heroically achieved object.",Lightsey Darst



" They don't know what they are doing. They are predisposed to forget everything. It isn't really dance and only one of them can sing. I loved it!

Bunny Walker,Minneapolis Journal


An interview with Laurie Van Wieren and the filmmaker C.Ackerwomen
About "like a movie i saw once”

CA: How did you begin working on this new piece?

LVW: This work began when Paula Mann asked all of us to create something for her new series at the Ritz. I am very happy to be sharing a bill with Skewed Visions (Charles Campbell, Gülgün Kayim and Sean Kelley-Pegg), Michelle Kinney (and Jelloslave) and Time Track Productions (Paula Mann and Steve). Paula asked us to come and be involved in conversations with the other artist on the bill. We met a number of times and talked about our process’s, mostly about how we went about producing our own work and what it was like to have an audience expect a very specific style out of each of us. For me it was great to be in the room with everyone. Mostly, talking about the work with everyone made me want to do more work. I guess that I have slowed down in the last few years and these discussions just got me going.

CA: what is your piece about? Or is that a good question? Maybe you could just tell me about your piece?

LVW: Well, actually I don’t really know what it is about yet. I am in the middle of making it. I think this is true of many people who make dance. I guess I start the way a lot of the visual arts start. I bring elements together and then I try to see what happens. I have brought 6 performers together: dancers: Anna Marie Shogren, Megan Mayer and Myself, singer: Diana Grasselli, musician: Michelle Kinney and videographer Paula Mann.

CA: so Paula is in your work too?

LVW: Yes, during one of the earlier group discussions Paula said she was free to be in someone’s piece…I thought that would be just great. Paula always had a camera in our meetings. She podcasted our meetings! Actually the camera’s made me a little uneasy…so I decide to look into that… so Paula’s character is a documentary film maker. She will be videotaping our performances with a live feed during the show.

CA: what was your rehearsal process like?

LVW: All of the women in the peice have a number of things in common; they are all talented performers, creators of there own work and are extremely busy. We rehearsed in my living room when we had free time. At first I worked with one person at a time. In the beginning of each rehearsal we would sit down and write two pages of stream of consouisness writing. This would get us prepared to improvise in the same mind set. I asked everyone to let their hands and face lead the movement and let the body follow. We moved in a pathway moving upstage to downstage, like in a tunnel. I decided to keep what ever struck my fancy in rehearsal. A lot of the time I kept the part that made us laugh.Then we tried different ways of improvising together. At that point I would go away and put the pieces together and try to make some sense of it by making a story board.I would bring that in and we would rework it again.

CA: so what will we see? and hear?

LVW: Puccini, stream of consciousness improvisational dance, you will see costumes from 1964, you will see, wait a minute…I don’t really want to give it all away. Besides it might change by the time we transfer all the little parts that we have put together in my living room to the stage, it might change quite a bit.

CA: is there anything else you would like to add?

LVW: Let’s see…you could say it’s like a story of a videographer who follows an opera singer, an accordion player and 3 dancers around trying to capture their stories…but that’s not quite it. It is about the stage, being on the stage or wanting to be on the stage, it is about copying each other, it is about the gestures of women. It’s also about memory and remembering. It’s like trying to remember a movie I saw once…” LVW

CA: Thank you.

CA: has been making film since 1971.
LVW: has been arranging and rearranging individual’s idiosyncratic movements on stage since 1980.

Artist, Choreographer, Dancer, Performance Artist, Performing Artist, Theater

the remake of like a movie i saw once
like a movie I saw once
5 Dancers and a DJ
Good bye Mania, choreographed and performed by laurie Van Wieren
Anthony
Patrick's Cabaret,Dec. 2006
Antonia,Shadow Cabaret,Mpls