Crosswalk: new dances Where: WOW Cafheater, 59-61 E. 4th St, 4th Floor (between Bowery and 2nd Ave), F to 2nd Ave or 6 to Astor Place When: Thursday-Saturday, February 15-17 and 22-24, 8pm Tickets: $12, $10 students. For reservations, call (212) 545-5334 Web: www.jenabrams.org Press Contact: Jen Abrams, 917-364-2208, jenabrams@mindspring.com Elevator service may be available check the website for details. In CROSSWALK, downtown choreographers Jen Abrams and Kristin ONeal grapple with issues of character, place, and time in two new works.
Jen Abrams New York City Suite pits seven city dwellers against the grinding indignity and sudden grace of life in a perpetual motion machine. In 8:55am, wage slaves slog through their morning commute, driven by ringing alarm clocks, obsessive episodes, and explosions of everyday objects. 6:22pm literally enmeshes them in a web and subsumes them into a crowd of strangers. As they fight their way free, they tweak the notion of personal space and look at both the physical and informational density of the city. 2:33am peels the fae off an apartment building in the middle of the night, revealing the simultaneous sleepless lives of its inhabitants. With Sarah Cline, Jessica Dellecave, Janusz Jaworski, Jaclyn Moynahan, Parker Pracjek, Ariel Polonsky, and a rotating cast of ten non-dancers.
Convinced that she was born in the wrong era, dancer/performance artist Kristin ONeal creates a nostalgic tongue-in-cheek retrospective of old time radio in Radio Show. Marching back in time, the many faces and effects of vintage radio are revealed through stream-of-consciousness reenactments of famous commentators, backstage sound effects, and melodramatic scripting. Voices that were only experienced through faceless radio come to life through physical theatre, while a sound score of recognizable radio events reminds us that we stand today face to face with an eerily similar political reality.
====================================================== BIOS JEN ABRAMS has studied and taught Contact Improvisation for fifteen years, and teaches through Movement Research. Her work has been presented at BAX, HERE, Dixon Place, and WOW Cafheater, where she has been an active member for seven years. She has produced three full-length concerts of her own work at WOW, as well as two shared bill evenings with Risa Jaroslow and Eva Lawrence, and with Clarinda Mac Low and Tara OCon. She was a 2005 BAX space grantee, and is co-curator and co-producer with Sally Silvers of TalkTalk WalkWalk, an annual poetry and dance festival. Her choreographic work has also been seen at WOW in several stage plays with Dogsbody Theater. Jen relocated to New York City from Chicago, where she presented and performed in five full-length concerts with the contact improv-based company she co-founded, Limbic Fix. She is classically trained as an actor, and performed in plays throughout Chicago before moving to New York City to focus on movement-based performance. She is also a writer, and has given readings of her work at St. Marks Poetry Project, Halcyon, and Bar 13. By day, Jen works as a fundraiser for a small poetry press, and serves as Managing Director for Risa Jaroslow & Dancers. She also teaches Contact Improv through Movement Research. The Village Voice has said she is convincing no matter what [she chooses] to do, and Gay City News said, She has clarity and verve.
	KRISTIN O'NEAL earned her BFA in Dance from Wright State University (Dayton, Ohio) while performing with the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company II. Kristin has performed with Demetrius Klein, Gerri Houlihan (1995-1999), Dale Andrees Mary Street Dance Theatre, and with choreographers at the American Dance Festival and Bates Dance Festival. From 1997 to 2005, Kristin served as the Dance Coordinator of Broward Community College, choreographing and teaching modern dance, improvisation, and ballet. While at Broward, she performed and collaborated with local artists including Dale Andree, Joanne Barrett, Pablo Cano, Bill Doolin, Katherine Kramer, Nikki Rollason and Clifton Childree. Kristin has been commissioned by the Miami Light Project and Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and has been honored in the 2005-06 edition of Whos Who Among Americas Teachers. She holds an MFA in dance from the Hollins University/ADF program, and currently resides in Gainesville, Florida, where she is an assistant dance professor at Santa Fe Community College.