Buffalo Rising Online

Aug 28th, 6:20pm By Eli George

For Amy Taravella, this weekend means her solo in what took two years to accomplish. The artist has been working in an intensive two-week creation session with three other artists in four different cities in two different countries. Together, they have scrapped together funds to combine their talents and create a unique production based on the four humours.

The four humours was a theory of the makeup and workings of the human body that began with Greek and Roman philosophers. The humours consisted of black and yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. Each artist of this group represents one of the humours and last year, all four of the artists who stem from Buffalo, Chicago, Toronto, and Montreal, managed to make it to Toronto to create the first humour –also known as Jerry. For the first solo out of the planned four solos, they managed to all be in residence at the Toronto Dancemakers Centre For Creation, but this year, due to funding complications, Taravella has been forced to take a new route.

For her solo, known as Ann, she will use video shot in last year’s production to create a new work. The premise of each humour performance is dance and choreography. Taravella will dance alongside videos of the other soloists/humours while images of the character she has created (Ann) flash on the screen. This way of combining dance, film, and technology is what makes Taravella’s production so different. She says, “It’s a whole new way of bringing dance into the 21st century.”

“This is simply the evolution of a long project,” explains Taravella, “it’s pain staking work to synthesize it. The solos have been developed to a small degree – they’re like the seeds. There’s never a complete one-sided humour to us, it comes through the initial genre of dance.”

From that initial genre, the four humours/artists work together to serve the one. Later this fall, there will be a performance in Montreal and in the spring, a performance in Chicago, thereby finishing all of the four humours solos. Taravella is not sure how each of those performances will go, but one way the artists are considering is live – if they can find the funds. If not, the artists will find a way to still create something unique to present dance in a way no one has ever seen.

Taravella says, “In the last two weeks we have really found what you can do with art…and how you can use technology to further it.”
Alt Theatre
255 Great Arrow Drive
$15 or $10 for Students
August 29th and 30th at 7 PM
Here or 868-6847 for tickets