When asked if he has any advice for aspiring artists, LAB fellow Jumatatu Poe of idiosynCrazy productions replies, “Well, I can tell you what has worked in my experience. Rigor, honesty, humility, and patience.” Sounds like a beautiful set of ideals to live our lives by, yes?

Jumatatu grew up dancing around the living room and at parties with his cousins. He began studying art via theater. His love for performance is so deeply rooted that he even created plays in his backyard in 6th grade. Spending childhood on college campuses as the result of his father’s career, Jumatatu was fascinated with the movements associated with African dance and capoeira. The 28-year old dancer/choreographer began his serious dance training in college by studying contemporary African dance.

Sounds like someone you’d like to study with, right? Well you CAN!

Discovering the Dimensions of Flatness: A workshop in movement and performance
Saturday, November 20th from 1-5pm

The world is huge and, in a given moment, only a fraction of it is available to each of us. We organize our fractions into systems and patterns that we can process, that make sense to us. We make decisions about what is essential, and we allow ourselves to focus on those things. And sometimes, we have to limit our focus even more, to just the essential of the essential: a fraction of a fraction reality flattened into a more manageable size. What does this essential look like when it is all we know?

On Saturday, November 20th, from 1-5pm, dance/theater company idiosynCrazy productions will host a workshop that directs participants through some of the movement and performative techniques currently being used to create FLATLAND 2010, idiosynCrazy productions’ latest production. FLATLAND explores the difficulty of human communication in a world where the sound byte supersedes substance, the instant message overpowers the intimate one. FLATLAND will premiere at the Annenberg Center on January 15, 2011.

Participants should be prepared to explore athletic movement/dance, to
use their voices to sing/speak/yell, to share their personal experiences, to be specific, to think, to tell the truth, to lie. . .

Workshop Leaders: Jumatatu Poe and Shannon Murphy

Time: Saturday, November 20th, from 1-5pm

Price: FREE

Location: The Live Arts Studio at 919 N. 5th Street

Please RSVP to Molly with a short bio/introduction and a statement of your current artistic interests (less than a page, please) ASAP.

idiosynCrazy productions was last featured in the Live Arts festival in September 2010. For more on the company, please find us on Facebook.