Farmlab Public SalonFrank van de Ven & Victoria LooseleafFriday, April 17, 2009 @ NoonFree Admission

"Corpus Criticus: Bodies on Words - Words on Bodies"

About the Salon

Frank van de Ven and Victoria Looseleaf present "Corpus Criticus: Bodies on Words - Words on Bodies." Considering the art of improvisation as danced by Frank van de Ven, arts journalist and critic Victoria Looseleaf opens a dialogue with both performer and audience, demystifying the genre in real time. In today's environment where criticism is losing currency, we explore the conversation between the moving body - the unspoken - and that which needs to be said.

About the Salon Participants

Frank van de Ven: Frank van de Ven is a dancer and director who spend his formative years in Japan working with Min Tanaka and the Maijuku Performance Company. In 1993 he founded with Katerina Bakatsaki 'Body Weather Amsterdam' as a platform for training and performance. Since 1995 he conducts with Milos Sejn (Academy of Fine Arts Prague) the interdisciplinary Bohemia Rosa Project, connecting body and landscape with art, geology and architecture.

Interest in practice and theory led to working with other dancers and theorists in extracting concrete strategies for dance from the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari evolving around the question 'How to make yourself a Dancing Body Without Organs'. Together with Peter Snow (Monash University) he performs the Thought/Action Improvisations. An ongoing collaboration exists with musician Daniel Schorno, artistic director of Steim in the 'Noughts' project. He is a regular guest teacher at the SNDO (School for New Dance Development, Amsterdam).


Victoria Looseleaf is an award-winning arts journalist and regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times, Dance Magazine, Performances Magazine and KUSC-FM radio, among other outlets. In addition, she is the producer of the long-running cable access TV show on the arts,"The Looseleaf Report" (currently airing in New York City), as well as a blog of the same name. Covering music and dance festivals around the world, Ms. Looseleaf's recent travels have taken her to Havana, Lyon, Montpellier, Abu Dhabi, Amsterdam, Venice, Athens and Buenos Aires. She currently teaches dance history at Cal State Los Angeles and Santa Monica College. In an earlier incarnation, Ms. Looseleaf was a professional musician who recorded two albums of solo harp music, "Harpnosis," and "Beyond Harpnosis," both registered trademarks.


Photos courtesy Frank van de Ven (top) & Victoria Looseleaf (bottom)


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