Pooh Kaye & Michael Suchorsky Mr. Bears Furniture Testing Center

Brooklyn, NY: Roulette presents Eccentric Motions Dance Companies Mr. Bear’s Furniture Testing Center, an exuberant encounter with dangerous objects and debris, directed by choreographer and film-maker Pooh Kaye with music composed by percussionist Michael Suchorsky. Kaye will also be joined by performers Victoria Lundell, Colleen and Sabrina Blacklock, and Gloria McClain.

In addition to this program, choreographers Pooh Kaye and Sally Silver will also present a heroic effort to deconstruct an impossibly difficult improvisational performance of theirs circa 1984. Pooh Kaye and Ms. Silvers will be joined by percussionist, Michael Suchorsky and guest artists, Shelley Hirsch, John Kilgore & Colleen Blacklock.

Pooh Kaye’s exuberant films and dances were a vital part of downtown New York’s experimental art movement. Her company, Eccentric Motions, has performed at New York’s MOMA, Lincoln Center, The Kitchen and The Joyce Theater and nationally at the American Dance Festival and Jacob’s Pillow in Lee, Massachusetts. The stop” motion films have been seen at the Metropolitan Museum, The Whitney Museum and The National Gallery. She has taught at Bennington College and The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim and six NEA Fellowships. Ms. Kaye is currently a 2010 recipient of a Dance Media production grant awarded by EMPAC and funded by the Jaffe Foundation.

Michael Suchorsky has spent decades performing and recording around the world playing drums in a wide variety of musical genres; from middle eastern jazz, to microtonal, to punk rock. Michael Suchorsky has played in venues that stretch from CBGBS to the Berlin and Montreaux Jazz Festivals to Lincoln Center. He has long standing associations touring and recording with artists such as Lou Reed, Soldier String Quartet, jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, and French rock legend Jacques Higelin. He has also composed music for TV, and a variety of bands including his joint collective project the Every Man Band which resulted in a couple albums for ECM.

Sally Silvers has been making dances for 30 years & her association with Roulette goes back almost as far. She has performed and taught (improvisation, composition, repertory) nationally & internationally. Her theoretical writing, scores, and poetry have appeared in several journals including The Drama Review, an anthology of new writings by women published by Illinois University Press, and many poetry magazines. Silvers has received support for her choreography from the National Endowment for the Arts six times, twice from Meet the Composer/Choreographer Project for collaborations with John Zorn and Bruce Andrews, from the NY Foundation for the Arts, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, and from a Guggenheim Fellowship. Silvers is a New York Dance and Performance "Bessie" winner, has co-directed 2 dance films, Little Lieutenant and Mechanics of the Brain, and choreographed 3 musicals for the Sundance Theater Festival in Utah. She developed her concept of “live choreography” (making work live in front of an audience) in the mid-90’s. From 2006 to 2011, she danced in the recent new works of Yvonne Rainer.