Dumbo NYC

powerHouse Arena is pleased to announce dance performances

Human Spare Parts Choreography by Emily Power
and
Compound by Å pela Sterle Dance

Friday, November 10 & Saturday, November 11, 2006
Show starts at 8:00 pm; $15 at door

powerHouse Arena
37 Main Street, Brooklyn
Please call 917-841-4316 for more info

Presented with an expansive and thrilling new venue in DUMBO, Brooklyn, fellow Brooklynites, Emily Power and Å pela Sterle, decided to join together to inaugurate this unconventional and avant-garde new performance space with a shared evening of dance.

“These little snowflakes that fell to earth and melted in the heat of bomb blasts are not spare parts either. Show as much concern for them.”
—miketakesumbrage.blogspot.com

Is the potential for life more valuable than that which already exists? Or are those in existence mere bodies, which may be spared for testing political resolve?

Emily Power presents these questions in Human Spare Parts, a partial-evening length work that explores the true nature and value of the lately promoted concept of “snowflake babies”—children born from “adopted” frozen embryos that would otherwise have been discarded. During a recent press conference defending his veto against stem-cell research, President George W. Bush proclaimed that they should not be used for “spare parts.”

In Power’s work, limbs protrude from soaring cement columns, changing and evolving, but remaining only a physical shell. Are they human or are they less? Challenging their existence are the “snowflakes” that descend to distract and deceive, ultimately pushing the “spare” humans to claim their value as wholly human. Dancers: Carley Petesch, Emily Power, Špela Sterle, Emily Tremaine and Jessica Weiss.

Emily Power, a native Iowan, graduated from the University of Iowa with a BFA in Dance. In 2000, she moved to New York and has since worked with choreographers and artists including Jill Emerson, J. Mandle, Michelle Pritchard, Natasha Trifan and Carley Petesch, among others. Power lives and works in Brooklyn.

Špela Sterle Dance will perform Compound, a new collaboration towards a full-length project that fuses dance, words, and music to depict the struggle with society’s opposing expectations for women: everything is expected yet no one thing must define her. In Compound, Sterle explores movement as being pure yet inspired by gestures of everyday life; bringing a sense of visceral emotion and theater to the work. The movement is perfomed by Kim Berney, Emily Power, and Špela Sterle, and is juxtaposed against the words of three men with text by Michael Eldridge; original music composition by Andy Parsons.

Choreographer and dancer Špela Sterle is originally form Slovenia where she was a member of he Slovenian National Ballet. She came to New York in 1997 to study on scholarship at Merce Cunningham Studio. Sterle also studied Klein Technique and performed with various choreographers, including Stephanie Lazzara, Pat Catterson, Tina Croll, Elke Rindfleisch and Elise Knudson. Composer Andy Parsons and writer Michael Eldridge have been collaborating with Špela Sterle Dance since her full-evening concert at Joyce SoHo in 2003. Špela Sterle Dance has presented work at the BRICstudio’s Brooklyn Dance Sampler in 2005, DancenOw/NYC Festival 2004, Joyce SoHo’s Performance Mix Series Spring 2003, Brooklyn Museum of Art, WAX , The Construction Company and other venues. For more information, visit www.spelasterle.com.