Allston-based Subject: Matter Tap Dance Company will kick off the opening celebrations at 10 am with a performance accompanied by a live jazz band. Stay and engage with art installations by OJ Slaughter, Boston-based photographer, and Andy Graydon, Harvard Film Study Center Fellow.
From 11 am – 12 pm, the ArtLab will be transformed into an interactive laboratory where movement becomes the primary tool of research. Harvard University Fellow Ilya Vidrin’s Partnering Lab brings together expertise from Latin and Ballroom dance to aid the development of a mobile interface that investigates the ethical dimensions of partnering.
Subject: Matter is a tap dance company based in Boston, MA. Since its founding in 2015, the company has created and performed almost 20 pieces in over 50 venues across the East Coast, Midwest, and Canada. The company has been featured at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, The Inside/Out Stage at Jacob’s Pillow, Joe’s Pub in New York City with Dance Now, House of Blues Boston, Musikfest in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, The Montreal Fringe Festival, Stage 773 in Chicago, Illinois, and with a residency at MASS MoCA. Ian Berg, Director of Subject:Matter is a Boston-based tap dancer originally from Chicago, Illinois In 2018, Ian was named “Rising Dance Star” in the Improper Bostonian’s “Best of Boston” issue. Ian is also a musician, composer, and music arranger. He is an alum of The School at Jacob’s Pillow and the Boston Conservatory with a BFA in Contemporary Dance Performance. Subject:Matter has received City of Boston’s Boston Cultural Council Opportunity Fund program, a fund for Allston-Brighton artists that is supported by Harvard University.
OJ Slaughter is a Boston-based photographer who had a research studio with the ArtLab in the summer of 2019. During this studio they developed a new project entitled The Modern Black History Project.
The Partnering Lab, attend an open rehearsal of practice-based movement research with novel wearable technology. Led by Bok Fellow and Co-Curricular Harvard Dance Instructor Ilya Vidrin, the Partnering Lab connects expertise in dance practice with creative technology, mechanical engineering, and cognitive science. Their mission is to develop practical resources for embodied learning across domains including clinical care, education, and the visual and performing arts.
Andy Graydon, Harvard Fellow at the Film Study Center 2019-2020, often creates sound-based installations, films, and sculptures to address themes of community, history, and language. A* is Graydon’s newly commissioned video installation and sound composition muses on the Event Horizon Telescope, an international network of telescopes working together to capture the first image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. A process called Very Long Baseline Interferometry coordinates the simultaneous observations, allowing it to form one coherent picture. This process of resolving an image from patterns of interference, drawing from multiple perspectives that are distant and complex, is a central metaphor in the work. A* was commissioned by the 2019 Honolulu Biennial and was workshopped at the ArtLab in the Spring of 2019. Graydon lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts.