Speak Easy Secrets
an immersive ballet experience
21-23 June 2013, 8pm
Tickets: £10
For tickets, call 020 8507 5607 or book online: thebroadwaybarking.com
The Broadway, Barking, IG11 7LS (Five minutes from Barking Station)
For more info and press tickets: julia@gleichdances.org
Speak Easy Secrets is a unique evening that catapults audiences back to the American prohibition era of the Roaring Twenties. Directed and choreographed by Julia K. Gleich the performance blurs the lines between fantasy and reality revisiting music and movement from the 1920s, what some have dubbed the Era of Wonderful Nonsense. Despite prohibition, socialites and the working class found ways around the law to continue their mischievous fun by building hidden lounges where patrons would knock twice and “speak easy”.
The People Pile, guest artist Junior Laniyan (co-founder of London Tap Jam), and The Michele Drees Quartet all join a cast of characters that includes Capone, Zelda, Clarence Birdseye, and a troupe of flappers in this, Gleich's debut London season. Speak Easy Secrets puts the snap back in your garter!
Julia K. Gleich, CounterPointe curator and Speak Easy Secrets choreographer, is a critically acclaimed choreographer, teacher, scholar, and mathematics aficionado interested in re-contextualizing ballet: creating new environments for traditional works and illuminating the relationships between the traditional and the contemporary.
Her company Gleich Dances has performed in the UK and US including seasons at NYC’s Joyce SoHo (’01, ’03) and CPR (’11,’12) with critical notice in The New York Times, Village Voice, The New Criterion and Brooklyn Rail. She was an invited speaker at The Brooklyn Museum for her work The Brodmann Area’s which explored the cerebral cortex responsible for memory, emotion, aspects of language and vision, etc. She collaborates with Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology NYU Denis Pelli in an exploration of peripheral vision through dance. Her practice-based research on vectors and dance was published in the Dynamic Body in Space. Ms. Gleich is also a founder and director of Aegis Live Arts creating unique locational dance works that enliven history and architecture in London. Her most exciting moment in performance was dancing alongside Sara Rudner at the National Academy Museum in NYC.Gleich’s site-specific dance works include performances in drained pools, on piers, in train stations and an annual stint in the WalMart parking lot in Plattsburgh, NY (’04-’07). She was commissioned to create a site-specific work for the opening of St. Pancras International Eurostar station in 2007. She has collaborated with composers, musicians, designers, directors and writers and welcomes new ideas to challenge her own aesthetic. She is founder of Norte Maar for Collaborative Projects in the Arts in Brooklyn, NY, named by Jerry Saltz as “the closest thing to the eighties East Village. Start with Norte Maar…”
Ms. Gleich is Head of Choreography at London Studio Centre and technique faculty at Trinity LABAN Conservatoire of Music and Dance. She is a master teacher for Burklyn Ballet Theatre, VT, has taught at Peridance and Broadway Dance Centre in NYC, and in 2010 gave company classes for Michael Clark Company on the largest dance floor in Europe at Tate Modern Turbine Hall; she was a Ballet Mistress for Utah Ballet and Ballet West. Ms. Gleich’s training included: School of American Ballet, Melissa Hayden, Robert Denvers, David Howard, Peff Modelski, the Limón Institute and Cunningham Studio. She has been on faculties of the University of Utah Ballet Department and Manhattanville College and Molloy College in New York. Ms. Gleich earned an MFA from the University of Utah. She was on the Board of Directors for the American Dance Guild. Ms. Gleich is an advocate of new ideas in ballet. Her company will be in residency at Dance at Socrates in NYC in August 2013.
To learn more about Julia K. Gleich + Gleich Dances visit gleichdances.org
