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

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 13, 2002

Contact: Dixie FunLee Shulman
100 W. 57th Street #4A
New York, NY 10019
917.693.7299

World Premiere:
Dixon Place
presents Dixie FunLee Shulman and Anita Cheng,
an evening of dance and video

In one evening, the audience will experience two female choreographers' diverse takes on dance and video. Dixie FunLee Shulman premieres The Thinnest Woman Wins, a mostly comic dance/theatre spectacle that includes a beauty pageant, baton twirling, and inappropriate body hair. Anita Cheng presents dance solos, performed by herself and Guest Artist Meg Harper, alternating with short video works she has created in collaboration with visual artist, Ronaldo Kiel.

The details:

Dixon Place presents:
Dixie FunLee Shulman and Anita Cheng
June 20 at 8pm
At Dixon Place
309 East 26th Street, just east of 2nd Avenue
Tickets are $12 or TDF; $10 students
No reservations needed; door opens at 7:30pm

For more info, photos or interview requests, call Dixie FunLee Shulman at (917) 693-7299.

The Thinnest Woman Wins is Dixie FunLee Shulman's solo dance/theatre exploration of how the Western homogeneous image of the female body and face has resulted in life-taking eating disorders, in multi-billion dollar cosmetic, diet, and plastic surgery industries as well as an overall lack of self-esteem in modern women. The stylistically eclectic choreography covers a spectrum from daring to raunchy to poignant. The mostly humorous collection of vignettes combines many unusual elements, such as a beauty pageant where Shulman plays all the contestants, the story of Shulman being called "a friendly fifteen pounds overweight" in Cosmopolitan, as well as baton twirling, photo albums and inappropriate body hair. "Twirl," one part of The Thinnest Woman Wins, was seen this year as part of Dance Theater Workshop and Bat Theater's Fresh Tracks Series. About "Twirl," 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."

Dixie FunLee Shulman creates dances that are reminiscent of pop art, political cartoons and expressionist painting all combined and expressed physically. Shulman's solo "Twirl" was recently presented by Dance Theater Workshop at the Flea Theater and by BRIC Studio in Brooklyn. In 2001 she presented Web, her first full evening of dance/theatre in NYC at the Merce Cunningham Studio in March. This evening included an excerpt of http://www.media-verse, which was also seen at the Frederick Loewe Theatre last year and will be seen at HERE Arts Center in July. http://www.media-verse.com was originally created in 1996 with a grant from the Seattle Arts Commission. The Puffin Foundation is helping to support the remounting of The Thinnest Woman with the Fewest Wrinkles Wins in NYC in 2002. This production was originally created in Seattle in 1997 and 1999 at On The Boards with the support of the King County Hotel/Motel Tax. In 1998, "Twirl" toured Washington state with the King County Performance Network, a collaboration between 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 1994. dixiefun@nyc.rr.com

Anita Cheng presents dance solos, performed by herself and Guest Artist
Meg Harper, alternating with short video works she has created in collaboration with visual artist, Ronaldo Kiel. This performance will be the first showing of Cheng¹s work-in-progress with dancer, Harper, composer John Jannone, and artist, Kiel. Previous installments of this series, The Secret Sharer (1988) and Home of the Gesture (1999), both premiered at Dixon Place with funding from the Experimental Television Center. Cheng will perform Home of the Gesture, as well as short solos, Six of One (2001), and Land (2002).

"Every person's memory of lived-in spaces can become a library of dances. Built out of gestures from memory, buildings are stories, architecture is culture, and movement, their universal life."
--Home of the Gesture website: http://n2.burnettgroup.com/gesture/00.html

Cheng&Kiel videos will include: Cityshore (1995), INS (1997), and The Moment of Change Just Passed (1999).

Choreographer Anita Cheng received her BA in English from The Colorado College and her MFA in Dance from the University of Michigan. In 1991, she received a Fulbright in choreography to complete her Post-Graduate Studies at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. She has danced for Ann Arbor Danceworks, Whitley Setrakian & Dancers, and in the works of Betsy Fisher and Tran T. Thuc Hahn, among others. In 1997, she was recognized with a New York Emmy award as graphic designer for the series, The City, for Thirteen/WNET New York. In 2001, she was one of four emerging choreographers invited to take part in a Choreographers and Composers Workshop at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival held in conjunction with the Tanglewood Music Center. In February, 2002, she presented her full evening, REMAP, with the assistance of the Joyce Theater Foundation at the Joyce Soho, NYC. Website: www.chengdance.org

Guest Artist Meg Harper has danced in the companies of Merce Cunningham, 1967-1977, and Lucinda Childs, 1979-90. Her choreography includes Patterns in Space, 2001, a trio for Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. Ms. Harper works with theater Director Robert Wilson, and will perform in Prometheus, Relative Light, and The White Raven in 2002. She is on the teaching staff at the Cunningham Studio in New York, a position she has enjoyed since 1968.

Interactive media artist John J.A. Jannone has worked for over 10 years as a sound artist, performer and designer of artists' software. Recent projects include: electronic music performance at the International Computer Music Conference in Havana, Cuba and interactive video design for dance as part of the Active Space Residency at Grinnell College.

Artist Ronaldo Kiel¹s video and computer art work has been chosen for festivals, international exhibitions and symposia on art and technology such as the Prix Ars Electronica in Austria and the International Media Art Biennale in Poland. Cheng&Kiel's D'Invenzione, an interactive four-channel DVD-video installation, was exhibited at SESC Pompeia, São Paulo, and the Santander Cultural Center, Porto Alegre, Brazil.