Contacts:
Leslie Weddell
(719) 389-6038
Leslie.Weddell@ColoradoCollege.edu
Jessica Hunter Larsen
719) 227-8263
Jessica.Larsen@ColoradoCollege.edu
Colorado Springs, Colo – March 16, 2009– Lian Amaris, Colorado College assistant professor of drama and dance, held a three-day public performance titled “Fashionably Late for the Relationship” on a traffic island in New York City’s Union Square in July 2007. The performance, which was covered by The New York Times, The New York Post and Reuters, will be featured in a video installation that runs from April 3 through May 20 at CC’s I.D.E.A. Space, located in the Edith Kinney Gaylord Cornerstone Arts Center, 825 N. Cascade Ave., on the Colorado College campus.
Additionally, Amaris will give a gallery talk about the 72-hour performance, which used New York City as a living backdrop, at a reception at 4:30 p.m., Friday, April 3, at the I.D.E.A. Space. Both the exhibit and gallery talk are free and open to the public.
“Fashionably Late for the Relationship,” which was performed July 6-9, 2007, in the heat of a Manhattan summer, was filmed and compressed into a feature-length video work by R. Luke Dubois. The film and installation documenting the performance were featured in the 2008 Zero 1 San Jose Biennial: “A Global Festival of Art on the Edge.” The film will be presented at CC’s I.D.E.A. Space on three screens; two will run the full length film, beginning at different junctures, and a third will feature a shorter version.
The set was Amaris’ boudoir, and as she prepares for a night out, three days pass in the city around her. In the live performance, her slow, nuanced actions become a counterpoint to, and critique of, the rapid and unyielding pace of the public environment which she redefines as the private feminine ritual of a boudoir. Accelerated to 60-times speed in the final video, the barely perceptible acts of her intimate narrative unfold in a radically condensed time frame, making her action the punctuation within the ephemeral blur of the transformed urban landscape.
Amaris is an interdisciplinary performance theorist and artist who focuses on media, technology, pop culture and gender. She currently is the Robert and Ruby Priddy Professor of Performance Studies and Digital Media at Colorado College, and has performed at a number of internationally recognized spaces for experimental theater, including Performance Space 122, Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theater, The Brick Theater, The White Box, Galapagos Art Space, and the Knitting Factory.
Amaris has published articles in TDR: The Drama Review and Explorations in Media Ecology. Her current scholarship includes a chapter on the historical avant-garde, to be included in the forthcoming book “Digital Visual Culture: Intersections and Interactions in 21st Century Art Education,” and a chapter on Madame Tussaud's wax response to 9/11, to be included in the book “9/11 in Popular Culture.”
The exhibit is sponsored by the InterDisciplinary Experimental Arts program at Colorado College. For more information about the program, visit www.theIDEAspace.com. For directions or disability accommodation at the event, members of the public may call (719) 389-6607.
About Colorado College
Colorado College is a nationally prominent, four-year liberal arts college that was founded in Colorado Springs in 1874. The college operates on the innovative Block Plan, in which its 1,985 undergraduate students study one course at a time in intensive 3½-week blocks. The college also offers a master of arts in teaching degree. For more information, visit www.ColoradoCollege.edu