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| Our website has changed, you are being redirected to... AVYK.org We are pleased to announce the premier of our latest work, Nocturnal Butterflies, December 10-12.
 Photo Aleksey Bochkovsky
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| Nocturnal Butterflies is a multimedia dance performance dedicated to the legendary dancer, choreographer, mad genius, and beautiful myth of the early 20th century, Vaslav Nijinsky. Still considered one of the greatest dancers in history, Nijinsky revolutionized the world of classical ballet with primitivist choreography and sensual imagery that was highly controversial for his time. He had wanted to make a ballet called Papillons de la Nuit (Noctural Butterflies), showing the full range of human sexual behavior. Sadly, though, his career ended abruptly and he spent the last thirty years of his life in and out of psychiatric hospitals. Our goal in this performance is to penetrate the illusory world the genius preferred to the real one.
Central to our project are the notebooks Nijinsky kept during the six week period before he was first committed in 1919. These notebooks—full of strange dreams and fantasies, often of an unusual sexual nature—form the foundation of our research for our own Nocturnal Butterflies. In a new venture for Avy K, this research process has been open to the public, happening in the virtual space of the internet with virtual collaborators. To learn more about our research and Nijinsky’s life and career, read “Glimpsing Nijinsky . . . 100 Years Later” in the December 2009 issue of In Dance or check out our collaborative research blog, dreammapping.
Erika Tsimbrovsky is an innovator in the field of improvisational dance. Born in Kazakhstan, she studied modern and contemporary dance in Belarus, Moscow, and Amsterdam. In Israel, where she lived for twelve years, she co-founded the award-winning experimental performance group EVM Laboratories to research the interaction between diverse media structures and to develop improvisational performance techniques. During this period of collaborative research, Tsimbrovsky’s audio-visual-kinetic approach to performance evolved. Erika now teaches and performs in San Francisco.
Andrew Ward grew up in Berkeley and began dancing at Berkeley High School under the guidance of Linda Carr. He continued to dance at UC Berkeley while studying Peace and Conflict Studies. Andrew now dances with the Joe Goode Performance Group, Scott Wells and Dancers, and Erika Tsimbrovsky/Avy K Productions.
Suzanne Lappas is a professional dancer and teacher enthusiastically engaged in learning diverse approaches to movement and the means of inspiring it. As a performer, Suzanne can be seen on stages, screens, and outdoors with MotionLab, Scott Wells and Dancers, Limbinal, Erika Tsimbrovsky/Avy K Productions, the Lisa Townsend Company, Kunst-Stoff, and Smith/Wymore Disappearing Acts.
Kegan Marling has been professionally creating dances, sound scores, and installation pieces for the past 10 years. He has performed for artists including Bill T. Jones, Nigel Charnock (DV8), Lea Anderson, Scott Wells, and Della Davidson. He is a collaborating artist with Sideshow Physical Theatre and co-director of Spoon with Jane Schnorrenberg. Spoon has performed at the West Wave Dance Festival, PICA Time-Based-Arts Festival, CounterPULSE, ODC Theatre, and the Mondavi Center for the Arts. In 2006, Kegan was nominated for an Isadora Duncan Dance Award for Individual Performance.
Christine Bonansea hails from France where she spent many years studying modern dance and choreography. For the past ten years, she has been dancing in Europe and the US, exploring such diverse arts as Contact Improvisation, acting, clowning, video and graphics. She has performed with EmSpace Dance, Huckabay McAllister Dance, Lisa Townsend Company, PeckPeck Dance Ensemble, Paige Sorvillo/blindsight, Kim Epifano, Kelly Kemp, PunkkiCo, Catherine Galasso, Folawole Oyinlola, Jess Curtis/Gravity, Dance Monks, and Christy Funsch.
Lindsay Gauthier is a Bay Area dancer/choreographer and video artist. She has danced with Scott Wells and Dancers, Bow and Sparrow, LiYanna Silver, and ABD Productions. She is also the co-founder and co-director of Limbinal, a San Francisco-based experimental dance collective whose live performance and film work has been presented around the Bay Area.
Photo by Liz Payne for Alma Esperanza Cunningham Movement
Rosemary Hannon danced with Alma Esperanza Cunningham Movement at numerous venues including San Francisco International Arts Festival, West Wave Dance Festival, and ODC’s Pop. In 2007 she performed in Princess at the Joyce SoHo in NYC, which the New York Times described as, “always wielding potent force whether barefoot or wearing high heels.” She has performed improvisation with Scott Wells and Dancers, with the Body Cartography Project, and with Vitali Kononov at the American Dance Festival. In 2007, she formed NONO Dance Company with Kononov.
| | Directed/choreographed by Erika Tsimbrovsky. With dancers Andrew Ward, Suzanne Lappas, Kegan Marling, Christine Saulut-Bonansea, Lindsay Gauthier, and Rosemary Hannon, visual artist Vadim Puyandaev, London-based musicians Grundik Kasyansky and Ute Kanngiesser, video artist Ruslan Belorusets, lighting designer Kedar Lawrence, and concept-monger Laura Maguire. "Side Effects," an exhibition of original art and photography by Vadim Puyandaev, Aleksey Bochkovsky, Natasha Zborovskaya-Sigawi, and Izmail (Israel) Galin.BUY TICKETS"Genre-defying dance… Avy K dances physics, chemistry, technology, anthropology, architecture, and poetry.”- Silke Tudor, SF Weekly“Having more than a decade of what they describe as "audio-visual-kinetic" performance under their belts… they have also developed a fine nose for ferreting out good collaborators.”- Rita Felciano, SF Bay Guardian
Vadim Puyandaev has worked as a painter, sculptor, and designer for over twenty years and has been participating in multi-media dance performances since 1998. His fine art has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Russia, Israel, Japan, Switzerland, France, Spain, Canada, and the US. Puyandaev had also produced numerous pieces of public and monumental art, including a commission to design a bridge over the Red Sea in Israel. With Tsimbrovsky, he is a founding member of the creative collectives EVM Laboratories (Israel) and Avy K Productions (US), dedicated to investigating what emerges in performance at the nexus of different genres.
 Laura Maguire came to the US from Ireland to study Philosophy. She received her PhD from Stanford University, where she currently teaches. Laura has studied various forms of improvisational dance, including Argentine Tango and Contact Improvisation. She participated in Anna Halprin's 2006 reconstruction of Ten Myths and she also performed in Halprin's Dancing with the Rodins: Awaken. She recently choreographed a short dance for The Real Kim Harmon's Habeas Corpus.
Grundik Kasyansky is a London-based artist who works internationally in improvisation, live installation, and audio collage. Recent activities include a record with Jamie Coleman and Seymour Wright, a tour with Guillaume Viltard and Jack Wright, a record with Paul Abbott, as well as ongoing research within Eddie Prévost’s improvisation workshop. He has also collaborated with choreographers Erika Tsimbrovsky, Ximena Garnica, and Deganit Shemy, and with visual artists Shige Moriya, Ofri Cnaani, and Hagar Goren.
Ute Kanngiesser is a German-born, London-based cellist. Classically trained, she discovered a new way into music through improvisation while studying physical theatre and dance in Berlin. Since then she has played in collaboration with a wide range of musicians, dancers, and film makers. She is now an active member of a strongly diverse, deeply rooted community of improvising and experimental musicians in London.
Ruslan Belorusets was born in Ukraine where he studied applied math and visual art. Since moving to the Bay Area, he became interested in modern videography and produced a number of live performances, including Solstice celebrations in the tradition of Eastern Slavic tribes. Currently, his passion is working on graphic representations of social networks and teaching Yoga. 
Kedar Lawrence has been working as a lighting designer and operator since 2000. He has worked on shows throughout the Bay Area, as well as in Arizona and Spain, in spaces from 50 to 3,500 seats. Kedar is always looking to push the idea of what a lighting design can be and how it conveys emotions. His work with Avy K Productions on Nocturnal Butterflies is supported by a Lighting Artists in Dance grant from Dancers’ Group.
Aleksey Bochkovsky was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and immigrated to New York in 1991. He developed a passion for photography five years ago and after meeting his wife, Alena, also a photographer, moved to the Bay Area in 2005. Aleksey has participated in exhibits in New York and San Francisco and has received awards for his creative work. He and his wife are now working towards making photography their fulltime career.
Izmail (Israel) Galin is a visual artist and photographer born in Central Asia. He has been living and working in Tel Aviv, Israel, since 1995. There he worked with Tsimbrovsky and Puyandaev in their award-winning group, EVM Laboratories.
Natasha Zborovskaya-Sigawi is a visual artist and photographer based in Tel Aviv, Israel. She has collaborated with Tsimbrovsky and Puyandaev many times, both with their group, EVM Laboratories, in Israel and with Avy K Productions in San Francisco. | |
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This performance has been made possible by grants from Dancers’ Group Lighting Artists in Dance, Zellerbach Family Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Guzik Foundation, and Lincoln University.
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