Out and about: Vermont Performance Lab's September festival

Dahlia Nayar
(photo courtesy of Vermont Performance Lab)

Vermont Performance Lab's Progressive Performance Festival (September 4-6) welcomes Lab resident artists Martin Chaput and Martial Chazallon, presenting the US premiere of The Round, "a 90-minute experimental site work that combines movement, media technology, theatricality and sound installation with community involvement."

Audiences members, each equipped with ear-buds and their own smartphone, follow instructions for individual choreographed journeys around downtown Brattleboro. These experiences, the artists suggest, "will interrogate and alter our relationship with a familiar mobile phone technology, raising questions about the uses and potentials implicit in its ubiquitous presence in our lives."

Other festival events include:

Schwanze-Beast by Cuban-American feminist performers Carmelita Tropicana + Ela Troyano--"equal parts performance, scientific lecture and installation...the future becomes a lens through which to examine our present cultural landscape. The status of the animal species and their civil rights is closely tied to climate change and the preservation of all species, as well as class issues, immigration, sexual preference, race and gender."

Dahlia Nayar's dance and sound installation, 2125 Stanley Street, "influenced in part by her experiences growing up outside of Chicago with parents from India and the Philippines."

Vermont Performance Lab is a new type of performance incubator in the foothills of Vermont. VPL takes creation of new work beyond the walls of the studio and into the community by fostering experimental approaches to research and performance.

For a complete description and schedule of VPL's Progressive Performance Festival events, click here.