UNFURLiNG
(THE OLD ZOO – DAYDREAM LiGHT AND THE iN-BETWEEN)
A one night only, site-specific collaboration between Heidi Duckler Dance and visual artist Kim West, at the Old Zoo in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, California.
In the patinated ruins of the Old Zoo, Kim West's installation includes sculptural fabric flow bunchings, a mural amassed from over 2,000 handmade ceramic pieces, and a tableau of amorphous flora forms, that together form a project about the joyful evocation of flowers and color, wondering and wandering.
Bathed in magic hour light against this backdrop and as the sun begins to drop behind Bee Rock, Heidi Duckler Dance's choreography moves phosphoric luminescent performers in, amongst, and through the ruins, meandering the audience down paths of imagined possibilities, as whimsical notes float on the breeze and propel the journey.
Heidi Duckler Dance
Heidi Duckler Dance transforms spaces through the power of contemporary movement.
By migrating off the stage and into surrounding environments, Heidi Duckler Dance invites audiences to see their communities in a new light.
Heidi Duckler Dance was founded in 1985 on the belief that the arts can change our vision of the world – and of ourselves. The company’s contemporary dance approach values freedom, community, and inclusivity. Through performances, Heidi Duckler Dance reveals avenues in which Los Angeles can become a more inclusive and equitable city.
To date, Heidi Duckler Dance has produced over 500 original site-specific works.
Kim West
Kim West is a Los Angeles painter whose visual arts practice incorporates studio painting, mural making, ceramic building, and installation projects.
West's work engages with memories, reflections, washy landscapes, and color-forward, often technicolor bright botanical motifs.
Mural imagery may be familiar from work including Only One Way Through, a 5-story mural commissioned by Hauser Wirth on their Downtown L.A. gallery and described as "dreamlike", in the New York Times, or, by passing Kaleidoscope (How’d Ya Get to be Happiness?) on the PCH in Huntington Beach. The latter, at over 122,000 square feet, is a meandering imagined landscape that clocks in as the largest mural in California.
UNFURLiNG (DAYDREAM LiGHT AND THE iN-BETWEEN) is Duckler and West's most recent collaboration.
Previous installation activations include Lake Enchanto, a mural and layer painting project created in the abandoned 650,000 gallon pool at Peter Strauss Ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains, and permanently altered with shears and flames in a performance by Heidi Duckler Dance and experimental sound artist Davy Sumner, and, Luncheon on the Grass, a journey through Downtown L.A.'s Maguire Garden’s pools and fountains, designed by architect Lawrence Halprin. The piece culminated in an interactive ‘picnic’ on the grass inspired by the choreographer Anna Halprin’s iconic textual prompts for non-dancers.