NOW-ID Returns With 'FEAST'

(Photo: Conor Provenzano)

Press Release:

NOW-ID is proud to announce its second major offering of innovative, hyper local/international performance and design, FEAST. 

Following the highly acclaimed first performance, The Wedding, in the historically dynamic and architecturally rich Salt Lake Masonic Temple, NOW continues its exploration of place and turns its gaze toward the surreal and salty remains of prehistoric Lake Bonneville. FEAST will be an immersive experience for the audience, layering design, theater, movement, and video. Feast speaks to palates and appetites, hunger and satiation, tradition and experimentation, shared customs and the private experience.

Once again, NOW-ID is gathering a collaborative force of local and international creative artists.  Returning collaborators include Salt Lake dancer Jo Blake and Chicago’s Joffery Ballet’s Yumelia Garcia, both featured in The Wedding.  New collaborators include actors Alexandra Harbold and Robert Scott Smith, co-founders of Flying Bobcat Theatrical Laboratory; New York dancer, teacher, and choreographer Jenn Freeman; and Danish composer and musician Jesper Egelund Pedersen. 

Robert Scott Smith, Alexandra Harbold (Photo: Conor Provenzano)

In FEAST, NOW-ID renews its commitment to the exploration of place by turning its focus to Utah's austere, unique, and iconic landscape.  NOW-ID expands on its mission of interdisciplinary collaboration by inviting Flying Bobcat theatre company founders to be co-creators of the project. "This idea of mixing language/theater and dance was something that became of interest to me back in 2000,” says NOW founder and artistic director Charlotte Boye-Christensen. The concept became appealing to her after seeing a performance in her native Copenhagen that blended the two elements. She says that with scaled down sets, the text and performance created a fascinating dynamic, “which,” she says, “was often absurd and nonlinear to be expressed through a physical and sound logic and not through a recognizable traditional narrative logic. This was exciting to me and I have always wanted to find theater artists who had similar aesthetic concerns of this nature to work with. Then the brilliance of Andra Harbold and Robert Scott Smith entered my life and FEAST became a reality." Added to that, the west desert of Utah is the ultimate scaled-down set.

Of the opportunity to collaborate with Boye-Christensen and NOW-ID, Flying Bobcat’s Harbold and Smith state, “Charlotte works so instinctively with immediate access to such a deep, powerful choreographic language.  It is incredibly exciting to be in the room with Charlotte and to get to collaborate with her.  Her curiosity, focus, and playfulness have a ferocity to them which we really respond to.  In Flying Bobcat’s process, we work very physically in our storytelling.  We are always experimenting to find new ways in which the body makes the text true, inevitable, and alive.  We want to reveal internal states through language and heightened physicality.  Our mission and NOW-ID’s feel connected; we are both invested in the collaborative process and fusing forces across disciplines to become ever more fluent in our creative language.”  

Boye-Christensen explains that FEAST is about exploring place in both the external and internal sense. "FEAST for me is about the body," she says. "It is about ritual, it is about the human existence in all of its primal perversity and beauty. It is about blending language we understand with language we don't understand. It is about embracing the "place" in which we exist (the body, the mind, the Salt) in its deepest and purest form."

Welcome to FEAST: you're invited to the table. Clear the weekend of May 23/24, and purchase tickets at now-id.com.