Individuals with disabilities are encouraged to attend this event. A golf cart will be available to help transport audience members who need assistance moving between the performance sites. If you are a person with a disability who requires other accommodations in order to participate in this program, please contact Tony Orrico at anthony-orrico@uiowa.edu.
Bathrooms are available onsite.
Matty Davis with Tony Orrico, Clay Scofield, Johanna Kasimow, and Bryan Saner
Presented by PE (Physical Education) & Public Space One at the University of Iowa Ashton Cross Country Course
Gather at 7pm. Light refreshments will be served. The performance will commence soon thereafter. https://goo.gl/maps/ciZZGknJxfLK5WHb8
Duration: approximately 50 minutes
Tickets are sliding scale beginning at $10. All proceeds support the performers and the production of this work.
Situated at sunset amidst the Ashton Living Prairie Laboratory and traversing approximately 800 meters across the Ashton Cross Country Course, Die No Die is a performance structured in the spirit of a shooting star—bursting into view, scintillating, to be lunged after, beheld, or lost. The intensity of its arrival initiates idiosyncratic choreographies designed to “send the heart deeper,” as both performer(s) and audience negotiate the contours of meaning, connection, and control.
One after another, in linear succession, each performer comes crashing into space, initiating an embodied journey through specific challenges, demands, and freedoms. Each signals to the next through the felt beat of their hearts. Each carries us all farther into space.
Like maps are used to familiarize a person with the terrain, routes, and possibilities of a geography or place, Die No Die involves a publication (produced in collaboration with the Iowa City Press Co-op) that details flora, surfaces, history, and qualities as they relate to the performers and the performance’s trajectory. This piece of publishing—a preparatory exchange between the artists and the audience—is included for ticket holders at the $35 & $50 levels and is intended to initiate a relationship based on care and responsibility that is carried into the performance itself. You can pick up your publication in advance during PS1’s open hours:
Fri 8/18, 4-6pm (229 N. Gilbert)
Sat 8/19, 11a-1p (538 S. Gilbert)
There will also be an artist edition of the publication available for other ticket holders and walk-up attendees to communally consult on-site.
Die No Die was commissioned by The Momentary in Bentonville, AR, and developed with support from Art Omi and the Ucross Foundation.
Support for the Die No Die (Iowa City) publication is provided, in part, by the Iowa Arts Council, which exists within the Iowa Economic Development Authority.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Matty Davis is an artist who uses embodied forms of risk, trust, and empathy to collaboratively explore perennial questions of mortality, desire, and how to deal with one another and survive together. His work is marked by a unique degree of responsivity, constantly churning new relationships, iconographies, methods, and materialities.
Matty was born near Pittsburgh, PA, and grew up as a multi-sport athlete, which exposed him to visceral experiences of injury, resilience, teamwork, and play that continue to influence him. While expansive in its subject matter and material outcomes—sculpture, drawing, photography, and publishing—his work predominantly manifests in performance and dance, which he values as a communal space in which to be transformatively alive.
Described as “balancing ecstatically on the edge of life and death” (Zaritt), Matty’s work has been presented throughout at the US and abroad including at the ICA Miller at Carnegie Mellon University, the Fine Arts Center at the University of Arkansas, the Art Institute of Chicago, Bozar, the Palais de Tokyo, the Max Ernst Museum, Pioneer Works, and Steppenwolf Theater, among many distinct site-specific contexts. He has been commissioned to make performances for internationally-acclaimed artists such as Hito Steyerl, but also works intensely with surgeons, carpenters, aviators, athletes, botanists, and activists. He currently lives in California.
Johanna Kasimow is an artist and educator working in the field of theater and performance. Her recent creative research focuses on the interplay of clown and affect in performance in a new play titled The Grüb (Yiddish for grave), which probes the sensations of hiding, trans-generational inheritance, and the rhythms of survival in an underground pit.
Johanna has worked with artists and companies across the US, including: Pig Iron Theatre Company, The Eva Steinmetz Project, Antigravity Performance Project, Tiny Circus, New Paradise Laboratories, Nell Bang-Jensen, Talya Chalef, Lily Kind, and Alex Tatarsky. Previously at Public Space One, Johanna premiered City In Heat, a site-specific live cinema performance piece, as part of the Open Air Media Festival. Johanna received an MFA in Devised Performance from the University of the Arts/Pig Iron School. She lives in Iowa City and teaches in the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Iowa.
tony orrico is known for his ingenuity within the intersections of performance and drawing. His works investigate mental and physical endurance, somatic drawing, choreography, bio-geometrics and improvisational practices.
Orrico has performed/exhibited his work across the US and internationally in Australia, Belgium, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Mexico, Norway, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain. His visual work is in the permanent collections of The National Academy of Sciences (Washington DC) and Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC, Mexico City) as well as prominent private collections such as Grazyna Kulczyk, Kablanc/Fundación Otazu and Bergmeier/Kunstsaele among others. He has presented at the CCCB, Centre Pompidou-Metz, The New Museum and Poptech 2011: The World Rebalancing. Orrico was one of a select group of artists to re-perform the work of Marina Abramovic during her retrospective at MoMA (2010). As a former member of Trisha Brown Dance Company and Shen Wei Dance Arts, Orrico has graced such stages as the Sydney Opera House, Teatro La Fenice, New York State Theater and Theatre du Palais-Royal. Orrico is currently an Assistant Professor of Sculpture & Intermedia, and Dance at the University of Iowa, in Iowa City.
In 2020, Orrico was included in the book PERFORMANCE DRAWING: New Practices since 1945, a collection of interviews and essays exploring the relationship between drawing and performance, published by Bloomsbury.
Bryan Saner is a creative practitioner and maker focusing on performance, industrial arts, architectural restoration, sculpture, and neighborhood activation. He lives and works in Chicago and is committed to making appropriately designed objects and environments. He has also made a lifetime commitment to collaborate closely with artists, makers, and activists. His life’s work has been developing alternative, creative, educational, and economic communities and structures; both in and outside of existing established systems.
Bryan is a member of the Bluestem Building and Restoration co-op, Every House Has a Door performance group, the Chicago Opportunities for Peace Action board, the Farmland Forever land trust (South Dakota). He and his wife, Teresa Pankratz, have lived happily with two other families for the past 30 years in The Yard, a collectively designed urban land trust. They have one son, Jake, who is a freelance cinematographer.
clay scofield is an artist and writer who works between and across media. They create long-form experiments in self-making and becoming as play. Documents–from field notes to various findings as multimedia gesture toward simultaneous rupture and suture of meaning–are presented through publication, performance, and exhibition. They hold an MFA in Digital Art from Indiana University and a BA from Vanderbilt University, and recently completed an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. They serve on the board of directors of the School of Making Thinking, teach at Indiana University, and instigate various situations to incite play.