Popped!, an evening of dance developed and performed by Liz Casebolt and Joel Smith of Los Angeles Contemporary Dance Company will be held Friday February 16, and Saturday February 17, at 7 p.m. in the Richardson Dance Studio, Scripps College. This event is open to the public; tickets are $5. For more event information, please contact the Scripps College Department of Dance at (909) 607-2934. For more information about the artists, visit their website or email caseboltandsmith@yahoo.com.
Popped! features recent works created by company artistic directors Liz Casebolt and Joel Smith including After Words, Second Skin, It is what it is when it isn’t, Up to Here, and more. Casebolt and Smith premiered Popped! at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, California, in the fall of 2006 and have since toured sections of the show throughout Southern California and Arizona.
Casebolt and Smith’s signature duet, After Words (2006) is “…tremendously entertaining with laughing-out-loud humor…supercharged with sex, relationship angst and concerns about identity in the world,” says David Lemberg of Artscapemedia.com. Supported in part by Hothouse Residency at The Department of World Arts and Cultures, UCLA, Second Skin (2006) challenges ideas of power and trust in relation to gender.
Joel Smith’s new solo It is what it is when it isn’t (2006) uses fractions of queer theorists’ perspectives on hetero-normative behavior to resist conventional modes of dance making while focusing specifically on the negotiation of what the dance isn’t as a way of rejecting what it should be. Liz Casebolt’s Up to Here (2005), is a solo that represents multiple experiences and points of view in the wake of a national disaster. Using gesture, repetition, and variation the dancer alternately embodies various responses to create moments of earnest humanity.
Popped! will also feature reprisals of audience favorites In The Space Provided (2006) and No, No…She’s Straight (2005), both performed to original compositions by Los Angeles composer Alexander Tovar. In the Space Provided is a humorous, physical, and complex duet that investigates the realm of new friendships: the oddly coincidental randomness of first meetings and the ways in which we weigh and measure a potential friend when we are deciding if we want them in our lives. No, No…She’s Straight! is a brief and hilarious journey illuminating the imaginary meeting of two people, who, after multiple interactions of complex and quirky partnering, soon realize that they, in fact, are not attracted to each other but would rather be friends who make really smart dances that are not about heterosexual coupling.
Liz Casebolt and Joel Smith discovered a shared desire to make clever, socially charged, and humorous dances that challenge conventional notions of dance making. They formed casebolt and smith in the spring of 2005. Their collaboration has enabled them to unite two diverse histories, exposing layers of social, cultural, gendered, sexual, and educational differences. Liz Casebolt has a BFA in dance from New York University, was faculty at Scottsdale College, and is currently pursuing an MFA in experimental choreography at UC Riverside. Joel Smith has an MFA in experimental choreography from UC Riverside, has performed around the country and is currently a dance faculty member at Scripps College and Cerritos College.