May 3, 2011 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Harris School of Public Policy Studies
1155 E. 60th St.
Room 224
Presented by Julia Rhoads, Chicago-based choreographer and Artistic Director of Lucky Plush Productions
Julia Rhoads will share her project website StealThisDance.com and video clips of her critically acclaimed work Punk Yankees, a dance-theater work that unpacks ideas about authenticity, originality, and the ownership of dance in the digital age. Questions around these concepts become vital to raise as dance media becomes increasingly easy to reproduce electronically and propagate worldwide, and Punk Yankees addresses them with transparency and humor. Featured in the Chicago Reader’s "Best of Chicago 2010" for Best Commentary on Modern Technology by a Choreographer, "the fast-paced, witty Punk Yankees…is fundamentally paradoxical, tongue-in-cheek, subversive, and, best of all, great fun."
Julia Rhoads is a choreographer who has been described as "Chicago's resident surrealist" in the Chicago Sun Times, and "adept at both provocative and humorous material" in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. She is the founder and artistic director of Lucky Plush Productions, a contemporary dance-theater company. Julia was recently named one of Dance Magazine's "25 to Watch" in 2010" and included in New City's 2010 feature "The Players: The 50 people who really perform for Chicago." She earned a BA in History from Northwestern University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute Chicago, and currently teaches in the theater department at Columbia College Chicago and the dance department at Northwestern University.