Cid Pearlman: San Francisco International Arts Festival

Laurie says:

My daughter Cid Pearlman is currently in Estonia.  We had a good visit before she left in the early AM last week.

I am back in Tallinn, Estonia, and it’s a bright, clear day in Old Town. I’m here with funding from the U.S. Embassy/Estonia to create a new work for next summer’s Hiiumaa Dance Festival. Tonight I begin rehearsing with five terrific dancers – mostly former students from Tallinn University.

While I am in Estonia I will also rehearse with a different group of dancers for our upcoming From Estonia With Love California tour in May. It’s a crazy wonderful life.

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They will be performing:

What We Do In Winter (excerpt here), it features dancers from Estonia and the United States, performing to an original score. Pearlman’s long time collaborator, composer Jonathan Segel (Camper Van Beethoven), with costumes by Estonian scenographer Pille Kose. Starting as strangers—foreign bodies in the same room—this international collaboration reflects on the process of getting to know each other during the long, dark Estonian winter.

She spent the academic year (2009-2010) in Estonia on a Fulbright scholarship.

As her web site says:

…teaching at Tallinn University and collaborating with Estonian dance artists. During her year in Northern Europe, she fell in love with Estonia in all its complexity. One of the highlights was working with an extraordinary group of dancers—three Estonians and two Americans: Tiina Mölder, Rain Saukas, Helen Reitsnik, Alexis Steeves and David King. Together, they experimented with performance and embodiment, thinking about how to create environments in which the dancers could be wholly themselves, while simultaneously working with the choreography that they created. Out of these experiments came This Is What We Do in Winter.

I watched  the creation of this work from a distance and it is amazing.

There are early bird tickets available until the end of March for the performances at the San Francisco International Arts Festival May 19 & 20thsl . They will also perform in Santa Cruz at Motion at the Mill May 17-18, at UCLA, May 24, and at Live Arts Los Angeles, May 25. Works by her colleagues from Estonia will be included on the SC and LA programs. In Santa Cruz only, audience favorite “catch-as-catch-can” (2006) will performed by members of Flex dance company.

…even-more-intimate layers of meaning are found in many of the works by artistic director Cid Pearlman, praised for her ‘shimmering intelligence’… The LA Times

Check it out. I just got my tickets.