Music and Dance in Performance

Trident Gallery is pleased to present the Ipswich Moving Company, led by artistic director and choreographer Janet Craft, and the Boston-based improvisational music trio of Emilio Gonzalez, Matt Samolis, and Dei Xhrist for a Trident Live Art Series performance of modern dance and improvisational music.

The Ipswich Moving Company will present four excerpts from Look, Look Again / Dance Installation (2015), and the musicians will present Space Abstraction Study #6, an improvisational piece for amplified kalimba, flute, and voice/movement.

The Ipswich Moving Company is a professional modern dance company based in Ipswich MA led by Janet Taisey Craft for over thirty years. Gonzalez, Samolis, and Xhrist are, in various combinations, musicians, composers, scholars, musicologists, sonic curators, and performance artists.

The Ipswich Moving Company makes its home in a renovated barn in Ipswich and has contributed to the artistic life of New England for over thirty years.

The Company presents modern dance performances in theaters, schools, outdoor spaces, and galleries. It has performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and their full-evening aerial dance concert, Free Fall, has been aired on British Cable TV, produced on the worldart.com webcast, and presented in the Boston Center for the Arts’ Spotlight on Dance Series.

Since 1986, the Company has created original aerial productions that have expanded the scope and enhanced the technology of aerial dance. Recent major productions include, Images(2011), a collaborative performance with The Orchestra On the Hill; Ground (2012), an aerial dance performance; and Look, Look Again / Dance Installation (2015).

The Ipswich Moving Company School is an educational center for dance. The school offers Summer Aerial Dance Intensives (e.g., July 6–10, 2015).

Janet Taisey Craft is the founder of The Ipswich Moving Company. Her choreography has been presented in the US, the UK, the Netherlands, and Russia. Her choreography has received recognition from the Massachusetts Artist Foundation and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She was the Head of Dance at Emerson College for twenty-four years. She created her first aerial dance using looped climbing rope in 1986 for the Montserrat Gallery and has continued to define and refine her unique form of aerial dance. In 2008, Janet joined the dance faculty and a became a guest choreographer at Perry Mansfield Performing Arts School and Camp in Steamboat Springs CO, where she created new aerial works for five summers. In 2014, she formed an intergenerational ensemble of dancers who created and performed original works in a concert entitled Here & Now.

Emilo Gonzalez is a pianist, musicologist, and composer with roots in North Carolina and northwestern Spain. In addition to pursuing research interests in fifteenth-century Spanish music and the musical traditions of twentieth-century American ballet and modern dance, he explores improvised and notated traditions of music and movement with other musicians and dancers in a broad variety of settings around the greater Boston area.

Matt Samolis has been working in sonic and visual mediums since 1987. He began studying flute, and later included composition and tenor banjo. He has worked with ensembles at New England Conservatory, Brandeis University, Berklee, and Tufts, as well as Open Hand Theatre, Pilgrim Research Collaborative, Mobius, Roy Hart Theatre, and numerous other projects. Currently, his focus is on composition and performing as a flutist with various groups. He also curates a concert series of new music at the Church of the Advent Library in Boston.

Dei Xhrist is a visual artist working with illustration, dioramas, performance and vocalism. She has worked with the Empire S.N.A.F.U. Restoration Project’s immersive installations as an actionist and moving figure. Her vocal work with Birdorgan blends glossolalia, torch songs, and bel canto with noise drones, psychedelia, and early Krautrock. She performs in Eastern MA and regional experimental music festivals.