MorningA Dance Performance at Not A CornfieldSATURDAY AUGUST 20 @ 7am

Growing in the historic center of Los Angeles, the Not A Cornfield project transforms an industrial brownfield site into a cornfield for one agricultural cycle. Now the Los Angeles Historic State Park, the site popularly known as 'The Cornfield' has remained derelict for more than a decade. Serving as both a potent metaphor and as a means of cleansing the soil, the planting of the corn reclaims this lost fertile area and aims to give a focus for reflection and action in a city unclear about the location of its energetic and historic center.

"Morning" is about the collective experiencing of imagery. Four dancers -- Roxanne Steinberg, Boaz K Barkan, Jamie Burris, and Oguri -- offer up their own stories to the cornfield, honored to take part in an evocative and fleeting dialog between people and place.

Lauren Bon's recent urban, public and land art projects have included actions in Northern Ireland, Hong Kong, Belgrade and Los Angeles. Her sculptures, installations and other works have been exhibited at venues around the world, including the UCLA Hammer Art Museum, the Santa Monica Museum of Art; and the Museum of Modern Art, Belfast. Bon holds a Masters of Architecture degree from MIT and a BA from Princeton.

Roxanne Steinberg is involved in many aspects of dance and theater production. Her performances and staging concepts have been seen in theaters, galleries, parks, abandoned factories, film, video and opera. She is a founder of Body Weather Laboratory in L.A. (1988), and the La Boca performance space (1991). She formed the Renzoku dance company with Oguri in 1994 and is an artist-in-residence at the Electric Lodge in Venice where she continues to teach Body Weather Laboratory.

Boaz K Barkan, originally from Tel Aviv, Israel, began dancing during his army service and in 1990 moved to the USA. Since 1998 Barkan has been performing and conducting BWL in New York, collaborating with artists such as Kenta Nagai, Raz Mesinai, DD Dorvilier, Marina Rosenfeld. Barkan has also been working with Anna Halprin’s art/life process at the Sea Ranch retreat since 1997, and recently performed at the Pompidou Center in Paris as part of the Halprin collective.

Jamie Burris joined Body Weather Laboratory in 1993 and has since danced in over 50 performances domestically and abroad as well as co-facilitating BWL workshops with long time collaborators Oguri and Steinberg. She has also worked with numerous LA based artists in dance, film, music and fashion. Most recently she danced with Oguri in "HOME" at The Electric Lodge and choreographed the short dance film, "Blogopolis." Burris has also created and performed solo works at La Boca, CSU San Bernadino, Glaxa Studios, Tsunami and Highways Performance Space.

Oguri, a native of Japan, studied radical visual arts, which led to his career as a performer and dancer. He studied with master Tatsumi Hijikata, the creator / inventor of Butoh dance. A resident of Southern California since 1990 he conducts Body Weather Laboratory a forum for investigating the body and dance (founded by Min Tanaka in Japan, 1978). Oguri received the Irvine Fellowship in Dance for Height of Sky, a project that took place in the deserts of Joshua Tree. It explored the development of his identity as a Japanese dancer in America.

Not A Cornfield
1201 North Spring Street
Phone: 323.226.1158
Always free to the public, handicapped accessible
Free parking at South and North Gates

DIRECTIONS (NORTH GATE): From the intersection of North Spring and College (Gold Line - Chinatown stop) take
North Spring north 3 blocks to the northern end of the project site. The entrance is on the left, co-located at 1799 Baker Street.

For more information, a live webcam, and a map, please visit the Not A Cornfield website
www.notacornfield.info