The Bridge: Elise Cowin

Up to the Elbows in What They Call Adventures

The Bridge
643 W. 31st St.
2/12 at 8pm: Elise Cowin and Dao Nguyen at The Bridge
2/13 at 8pm: Elise Cowin and Dao Nguyen at The Bridge

Suggested donation $10

Elise Cowin is a Chicago-based artist working across choreography, writing, and sculpture. Her approach to performance explores choreography as a visualization of tacit directives and the ways personal history, site, socioeconomic pressures, and the weight of tradition might inscribe bodies to perform. She has shown work at Mana Contemporary, Defibrillator Gallery, and Sullivan Galleries in Chicago; Load of Fun Gallery in Baltimore; Teatro dell’Accademia di Belle Arti in Naples; and Palazzo Albrizzi in Venice. She currently teaches for the Early College Program at School of the Art Institute and is Adjunct Faculty of Dance at College of Dupage in Glen Ellyn.

Up to the Elbows in What They Call Adventures is a performance spurred by two sources: historical patents for inventions that attempted to bestow the body with extraordinary capabilities, like flappable wings for soaring to never-before-seen heights, and Cervantes’s Don Quixote, which muses on how the fictional and fantastic collide with and shape everyday reality. Choreography springs from its proximity to patent-inspired sculptures, Cervantes’s writing, and past dramatizations of Don Quixote; diverse performers sally forth, striving for synchronized gesticulations; and a patchwork of intertextual writing trots alongside the action as fast as it’s donkey can carry it. Onward!