May 5, 2006
Dance New Amsterdam
August 18 - 30, 2004
Metro Gilded Balloon
Edinburgh Festival Fringe
April 15, 2003
Joyce SoHo
April 8, 2003
Unusual Beauty Contestants Tour
June 15, 2002
HERE Arts Center
May 13, 2002
Dixon Place
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 15, 2003
Contact: Dixie FunLee Shulman
100 W. 57th Street #4A
New York, NY 10019
917.693.7299
NYC Premiere:
Dixie Fun Dance Theatre presents
The Thinnest Woman with the Fewest Wrinkles Wins
At Joyce SoHo on July 24-27, 2003
The Thinnest Woman with the Fewest Wrinkles Wins (TTWWTFWW) is a full-evening, multi-generational, laugh-out-loud, activist dance performance spectacle for 25 women and 1 man. The spectacle explores how the prevailing Western image of the female body and face has resulted in life-taking eating disorders, in multi-billion dollar cosmetic, diet, and plastic surgery industries and an overall lack of self-esteem in modern women. The stylistically eclectic choreography covers a spectrum from daring to raunchy to poignant. The event promises to bombard all of the senses, including taste and smell.
The details:
Dixie Fun Dance Theatre presents:
The Thinnest Woman with the Fewest Wrinkles Wins
July 24-27 at 8pm
At Joyce SoHo
155 Mercer Street
Tickets are $15
Call (212) 334-7479 for reservations
For more info, photos or interview requests, call Dixie FunLee Shulman at (917) 693-7299
The Thinnest Woman with the Fewest Wrinkles Wins begins with a seemingly normal beauty pageant, except the contestants are clad in banners such as "Miss Liposuction," "Miss Bulimia," and "Miss Breast Implants." There are the obligatory swimsuit and evening gown competitions, as well as outrageous costumes, a video of the contestants frolicking around the city, and a giant 10 ft. long and 7 ft. high pump in which the dancers climb the heel and slide into the sole. The same dancers perform a powerful segment that explores the other side of the virgin/slut coin-the MTV female persona who is ready for sex with anyone at anytime. In addition, director Dixie FunLee Shulman performs two out of three alternating solos each night. In the rotation is "Twirl," about which Eva Yaa Asantewaa of the Village Voice wrote: "At first, Dixie FunLee Shulman seems a pudgy, loopy wannabe talking about being a fat girl in majorette competitions, but her awesome twirling skill grabs our attention. By the time the piece ends--silently--Shulman has become a powerful, beautiful woman." The evening includes two other beauty pageants whose contestants are women of various ages, sizes, shapes, colors and backgrounds. These "pageants" are collaboratively created, and the performers share their own words and movements with raw honesty and an ability to laugh at oneself. The evening concludes with all the performers onstage dancing together, creating an empowering and diversified image of what being a woman can look like. Some of the show's 25 performers are: Alice Klugherz, Kelly Hayes, Stacey Royce, Katy Woitel, Macushla Hill, Kathleen Connolley, Marge Hauser, and Steve Fetherhuff. The production features original music by M.Vargas, video by Daniel, and set and prop design by Jena Jones-Dost and David Dingman.
Dixie Fun Dance Theatre creates dances that are reminiscent of pop art, political cartoons and expressionist painting all combined and expressed physically. The choreography typically combines outrageousness and humor with serious subject matter. The result is provocative theatre that is entertaining while promoting social and political change. DFDT's choreographic process begins in the library. Movement is never for movement's sake only, instead, all of the choreography directly reflects the specific ideas and imagery generated by the research. DFDT's style is eclectic because any style or genre of movement might be incorporated into a dance, whatever is most compelling in exploring the subject matter. For example, in TTWWTFWW the movement styles range from campy Broadway dancing to provocative, erotic jazz to thrashing, jarring modern movement to pedestrian, physical theatre. The overall structure of each dance is also a reflection of the topic. For instance, TTWWTFWW involves multi-generational community members in order to broaden our idea of female beauty. Read and see more at www.dixiefundance.com
The creation of Joyce SoHo was made possible by the magnanimous support of the LuEsther T. Mertz Charitable Trust. Joyce SoHo is supported by private funds from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, The Harkness Foundation for Dance, J.P. Morgan Chase, Mertz-Gilmore Foundation, and by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
The Thinnest Woman with the Fewest Wrinkles Wins is partially supported by the
Puffin Foundation and the Open Meadows Foundation.
Bios of collaborators for The Thinnest Woman with the Fewest Wrinkles Wins
Dixie FunLee Shulman, (Director), created Dixie Fun Dance Theatre to perform Web at the Merce Cunningham Studio in 2001. In 2002, Shulman performed her signature solo, "Twirl," in Dance Theater Workshop's Fresh Tracks series, PS122's Avant-Garde-Arama, the Dancenow Festival at John Jay Auditorium, and the Estrogenius Festival at Manhattan Theater Source. Also in 2002 Shulman premiered her one-woman show, The Thinnest Woman Wins, at Dixon Place and Sal Anthony's Movement Salon, with later performances at the First Glance Festival in Atlanta and Canopy Studio in Athens, Georgia. Excerpts of The Thinnest Woman Wins were performed in New Dance Alliance's Performance Mix at HERE Arts Center and at BRIC Studio in Brooklyn. The company performed http://www.media-verse.com at HERE Arts Center, a piece that had its start with the help of the Seattle Arts Commission. The Thinnest Woman with the Fewest Wrinkles Wins began in Seattle with the support of the King County Hotel/Motel Tax and the On The Boards Artist Access Program. In 1998, "Twirl" was toured with the King County Performance Network, a collaboration between the King County Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts and eleven local venues. Dixie graduated summa cum laude with an M.F.A. in Dance Performance and Choreography from the University of Colorado in Boulder. In addition, this past year Shulman is very fortunate to be dancing with David Parker and the Bang Group.
David Dingman (set designer) With a degree in mechanical engineering and a compulsion to create interesting things that haven't ever graced the planet before, David has worked on sets for several theatre and dance productions, ranging from large scale organic welded sculptures in a Dr. Seuss tribute, to mobile fabric structures to ship-sized spaces inflated from polymer film. Right now working in NYC as a finish carpenter, his involvement in the arts is the reason he gravitated to this great city.
Jena Jones (sculptor-prop creator) began showing her work in 1996 in Atlanta, Georgia. Since then she has co-founded Ballroom Studios in Atlanta and New York (1998), a not for profit artist collective, gallery and performance space dedicated to providing space, community and public forum where emerging and mid career artists can create new work. In addition to establishing and inspiring contemporary artist collectives she has created and exhibited her sculpture in New York and Atlanta over the past five years. She has received the Chatam Valley Grant, Gene Allcot Scholarship, Laura Dorsey Scholarship and the Coca Cola Scholarship, for excellence in sculpture. Jones's sculptures are individual characters developed somewhere between science fiction, animation and baroque sculpture. She takes much of her inspiration from movies, myths, science fiction, cartoons, children's perspectives, feminine representation, toys, consumable products, and Japanese and American animation. Her work also makes statements on male and female relationships and supposed differences, feminist issues, and it mediates the contradiction and possible merge between a fine art object and mass culture object.
M. Vargas (composer) began playing music in 1959. Since then, her curiosity has led her through many contexts, from cocktail lounges in Indonesia to underground clubs on New York's Lower East Side, from the Kennedy Center to nursing homes, from Grimm's fairy tales to Playback Theater. Though she has performed music from Mozart to Herbie Hancock to John Cage, she has spent the last 20 years devising her own forms of music based on structured improvisation. In addition to her pure music work, Vargas has composed numerous commissioned scores for dance since 1983. She makes music for ballet, modern, postmodern and community dance contexts, specializing in live music composed on the spot. She has taught music and improvisation in workshops and at colleges across the U.S.
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