Artist in residence Maxine Flasher-Düzgüneş presents an evening-length installation on the three-dimensionality of erasure poetry and its cross pollination with the disciplines of dance, animation, sound, and scenic design.
Original poems of Surel’s Place workshop participants will be displayed and opportunities will arise for attendees to strikethrough portions of text to create new ones. What remains of the poems will change the landscape of the space…
The installation will culminate with a solo performance in response to “strikethrough 48,” an erasure poem about ending one’s life in a country flooding with natural beauty but drought-ridden when it comes to services for the mentally ill. In collaboration with Taipei based animators Jade Lien & Irene Lin, whose "drawn-on-film" technique will be projected at intervals throughout the evening, along with ambient sound by Salt Lake City based composer Michael Wall.
A talk-back at 8pm will discuss the impact of interactive media and how both language and dance can be malleable and ephemeral in their attempts to touch the hearts and minds of those who encounter them.
BIOGRAPHY
Maxine Flasher-Düzgüneş is Turkish-American poet, choreographer, and filmmaker based in Northern California engaging with the disciplines of choreography and visual art as tools for grasping poetic language. Her work critically investigates how poetics can serve as a thread in understanding where the body belongs in the vastly changing ecosphere. She has served as resident artist at Djerassi Resident Artist Program, Tofte Lake Center, Stapleton School for the Performing Arts, SAFEhouse Arts, and The Center at Eagle Hill, and has been commissioned for World Stage Design (Canada), 92NY’s Future Dance Festival (New York), and FACT/SF Summer Dance Festival (San Francisco). Her dance films have received official selection from festivals including Cadence Video Poetry Festival (Seattle), kNOwBOX Dance Film Festival (Texas, South Korea & Mexico), Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema (Colorado), and SzólóDuó International Dance Festival (Hungary). Her choreographic poetry platform, strikethrough-score.org, has been presented nationwide at Noori/TWIG Media Lab (Salt Lake City), Museum of Wild and Newfangled Art (New York), and in San Francisco at The Drawing Room SF and Mark Foehringer Dance Project, and published with Poethesis Mag (UK), LOCULUS Collective (Massachusetts), and Pinky Thinker Press (New Jersey). She is the author of heart-shaped box, a poetry chapbook from Ghost City Press (2022), and through Eileeen, a young-adult novella from VerbalEyze Press (2020). Maxine received a B.F.A. in Dance (magna cum laude) from NYU Tisch and an M.A. in Dance Philosophy (with distinction) from University of Roehampton London as a US-UK Fulbright Finalist. She currently dances with pateldanceworks, MovingGround, and Push Up Something Hidden, covers the global dance scene for Dance Art Journal (UK), and teaches with CalPoets, Gallery Route One, and Alonzo King LINES Ballet. She is the founding director of Marin County, California’s first Youth Poet Laureate Program.
