Susan Banyas
A return engagement, with new score composed and performed by David Ornette Cherry, commissioned by ALOUD
A stirring poetic monologue-with-movement about political engagement, based on Banyas' great-grandmother – an Ohio Quaker – whose Civil War diary suggests her participation in the Underground Railroad.
Susan Banyas is a dancer, storyteller, and writer whose artistic roots as an improviser, dancer, and experimental performance artist led to collaborations through SO&SO&SO&SO Inc. Her current performance projects, No Strangers Here Today, and The Hillsboro Story, are centered in Highland County, Ohio one hundred years apart and dance between memory and American history from the Civil War to the early years of the Civil Rights Movement. Everyday Dancing, A Dance Lecture, which she presented at the International Society for the Study of Time conference in Monterey, CA is developing into a dance and text quintet, with everyday photography, titled It's Been a Busy Week.
She co-founded Dreams Well Studio (1991-2003), a low tech performance and teaching laboratory, where she produced and directed poetry shows, Soul Stories evenings, dance/theatre pieces, and gender-inspired shows in collaboration with some of Portland's finest theatre artists, poets, musicians, and dancers. She has also taught extensively in schools, colleges, and universities and is a creative consultant to organizations and individuals.
She has published essays on art and politics and is currently a member of the Maya Angelou Writers Guild in Portland. Music/spoken word CDs, visual books and image cards from her scripts, short stories, paintings, and photography emerge from the improvisation experiments at the heart of art practice. Her work fuses movement, language, and music into physical images that "speak" about the times we live in, the encounters we experience, and the memory places we inhabit.
David Ornette Cherry, winner of the "2003 ASCAP-Chamber Music America Award for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music," is composer, arranger, and band leader. The ambient music streaming through his childhood was generated by the early collaborations of his dad, Don Cherry, with Ornette Coleman and the musicians who visited his parents' Mariposa Avenue home in Los Angeles. Cherry studied music composition at Bishop College in Dallas and concentrated on world music at California Institute of the Arts. While jazz remains both the root and sustenance of his sound, he often incorporates the sounds of the world in what he calls "multi-kulti" music. His background includes performances with Don Cherry, Ed Blackwell, Charlie Haden, Billy Higgins, Nana Vasconcelos, Olatunji, Hassan Hakmoun, Carlos Ward, Jim Pepper, Collin Walcott, Wadada Leo Smith, and Justo Almario.
Visit David Ornette Cherry's website
Unless otherwise indicated, ALOUD programs take place at the Los Angeles Central Library's Mark Taper Auditorium, 630 W. Fifth Street, Los Angeles, CA 90071.
