In Habit: Living Patterns is a FREE performance by Aniccha Arts that will take place at the Central Avenue Bridge underpass in conjunction with Northern Spark on June 7th, 8th and 9th, 2012.

“Ultimately we choose which habits to repeat. It is in this choice that we become and are always becoming, always crafting our social skin.”—Pramila Vasudevan

At the 2012 Northern Spark Festival, Aniccha Arts will premiere a nine-hour overnight outdoor performance at the Central Avenue Bridge underpass.In Habit: Living Patterns explores the collectively learned habits and practices that emerge from the everyday, critiquing the acts of power that are reinforced by these patterns. In Habit: Living Patterns is composed of sixteen vignettes featuring performers dancing and interacting within an immersive electronic music and video environment in the landscape of the patterns of movement among the Festival's attendees.

We Need Your Support

At the Northern Spark Festival, the Aniccha Arts ensemble is faced with a new challenge of performing for an uncontained audience while attendees move freely throughout the event. This will deepen our understanding of how different-sized audiences can affect the way both artists and audience members experience and interact with the performance itself.

The Festival presents a non-traditional theater setting (where the work determines the location of both the stage and audiences), raising the bar for the artists of the company to create and adapt to a performance environment that includes the unpredictable nature of both the weather and performer-audience interactions, in addition to the varying audience attendees who will flow through the performance at varying times. In short, overcoming the barrier of a traditional performance context is an exciting development for the growth of the company.

We are thrilled to have the opportunity to perform at the Northern Spark Festival, but we need your support to make this happen. Your donation will go toward the cost of equipment, supplies, and rehearsal space for this performance. As a gesture of our appreciation for your support, we would like to offer a few incentives, which are listed in the "pledge" column to the right.

Rewards

About Aniccha Arts

Aniccha Arts is a performing arts company that uses dance and electronic media to interrupt public space and invoke mass response. This sense of interruption, which involves an immersive atmosphere and interaction between audience members and performers, is conveyed through kinetic presence, a mode of artistic integration that simultaneously centers visual art, sound, and a movement aesthetic rooted in contemporary Indian dance and multiple dance forms. Trained in Indian dance and visual media, Pramila Vasudevan is the founder and artistic director of this company. Aniccha Arts' repertoire includes Dousing the Mirage (2007), presented by Center for Independent Artists; an excerpt of The Wet Bug Hush (2008), featured in the Choreographers' Evening at the Walker Art Center; The Weather Vein Project (2009), a part of the Artists on the Verge fellowship at the Weisman Art Museum; and Words to Dead Lips (2010) of the Catalyst Series at Intermedia Arts.

The Aniccha Arts ensemble for In Habit: Living Patterns includes Pramila Vasudevan (artistic director,choreographer and dance collaborator); Piotr Szyhalski (director); Jasmine Kar Tang (dramaturg and dance collaborator); Caleb Coppock (visual media designer); John Keston (musician); Benjamin Reed (installation designer); David Steinman (technology designer); Clare Brauch (costume designer); Cornelius Coons and Annie Wang (graphic designers); Sarah Hoover Beck-Esmay (dance collaborator); Dustin Maxwell (dance collaborator); and Chitra Vairavan (dance collaborator).

Northern Spark is a free dusk to dawn, participatory arts festival that presents visual arts, performance, films and interactive media indoors and outdoors in both Minneapolis and St. Paul. In 2011, during the course of one night, there were 50,000 visits to 100 projects by more than 200 artists at 34 venues in collaboration with 60 partner organizations and sponsors. Explore a constellation of urban arts and discover the city in a new light. In 2012, Northern Spark takes place from dusk, Saturday, June 9, to dawn, Sunday, June 10. -> http://northernspark.org