Capital Fringe Special: Rachel Turner

Here's our third Capital Fringe Festival special! I'm pleased to introduce Rachel Turner, one of the choreographers and the chief creative mind behind Connectivity/Complexity.

What is your personal artist mission?
I want to create art that is accessible and welcoming to any viewer and that leaves the audience thinking about something new or thinking in a new way. You don’t have to understand dance or movement to find the message in my work, and the audience experience and takeaway is very important to me. Not just whether they “liked it,” but whether they felt something, could connect to it, were left thinking, etc.

How many times have you participated in Capital Fringe, and what do you value about being a part of Capital Fringe?
I have participated in Fringe twice as a performer. Last year, I was also able to share some of my choreography in one of the shows I was in. This will be my first year putting on my own show. As a dance artist, I love the opportunity Fringe offers to engage with a broader art community than just the dance community. The compact nature of the festival also gets me out of my house and seeing shows that I would not otherwise encounter.

What inspired you to do this piece?I’ll talk about our title piece, Connectivity/Complexity. This piece came together from multiple sources of inspiration, including my own experiences. I was listening to a podcast of some sort about how we, because of how and when our brains developed, cannot actually handle having more than about 150 people in our social network. This happened because our brains formed in a time when we lived in smaller communities did not really need to have more than 150 connections. However, technology has changed our networks and now we have

thousands of “friends,” a number past our brain’s capacity. Other parts of our brain developed in these simpler times of small communities, including our emotional functions. We are empathetic creatures. Being empathetic works when your world consists of your small community. Maybe we could kind of handle hearing about wars happening far away. But through technology and social media, our world is much bigger and we are hit constantly with vivid images and stories of tragic events happening. Do we have the emotional capacity to handle this influx of tragedy without either becoming numb and unfeeling or becoming totally depressed and devastated? This piece seeks to explore the expansion of technology in our worlds and how we can try to adapt and survive without losing our humanity.

How does this piece fit into your recent body of work?
This piece definitely fits into a broad theme of exploring what I live and what I see. It also fits a more specific theme of pieces, starting last year at Fringe with a work called “(Dis)connected,” that explore technology and social media and their influence on our lives.

What excites you about this piece? 
This piece is exciting for me because of both the content and the process. The pros and cons of social media are very interesting to me, and there are so many facets to consider. The anonymity of the internet, for example, allows people who feel isolated and different to find people who are like them, but this anonymity also allows for things like cyberbullying. I am always thinking about the effect technology has on our life, and creating this work is the process by which I explore these things. As I work with my dancers, their input and thoughts influence me, and the trajectory that the piece takes helps me get closer to finding answers to my questions.

You have THREE chances to catch Connectivity/Complexity,  as part of this year's Capital Fringe Festival.

Applications open for the 2016 Fringe Festival

The 2016 Capital Fringe Festival will run July 7 to 24.

The Fringe Festival is a self-producing performing arts festival where established and emerging artists can present their work free of a selection process. The Fringe Festival takes place over 22 days in July with over 140 productions, with roughly 800 individual performances, showcasing 5,000 artists for over 30,000 patrons each year. The Fringe Festival is DC’s largest and most anticipated performing arts festival.

Applications to participate are now open. There are two ways to participate, either at a Fringe Run Venue or by finding your own. Applications for Fringe Run Venues have two deadlines, an early bird at noon, October 16, and a final deadline when applications close at 5pm, Jaunary 8, 2016. The deadline for Find Your Own Venues, is noon on March 4, 2016.

Go to Capital Fringe's website, for more information and instructions to apply to participate in the Fringe Festival.

The Clarice is accpeting applications for the 33rd Annual Choreographers Showcase

Auditions for the 33rd Annual Choreographers Showcase are open to all dance-makers, aged 18 years and older, who live in Maryland, Virginia or the District of Columbia. Live auditions will be adjudicated by our expert panelists, Leah Cox and Zvi Gotheiner. Six finalists will be selected to receive an honorarium of $800 and present their work in concert on Saturday, February 6, 2016. There is no fee to audition.

Auditions will be held on December 5 & 6.

The deadline to apply is November 30, 2015.

More information and instructions at their website.