Dance: July 2010

The momentum from the 2010 World Environment Day continues as Pillow Project takes plastic to task.

PILLOW PROJECT PRESENTS HOT BOX: JULY 10
If you have a plastic house and a plastic fence, Pearlann Porter hopes you’ll do some remodeling. Pillow Project’s socially and politically aware artistic director addresses the need to reclaim the green Earth from the plastic planet via Hot Box, an evening of ecology-minded visual and performance art presented as part of the Second Saturday Series.

Porter and her environmentally conscious artistic collective of dancers, musicians and artists often retool existing choreography into new dances plus reinvent objects for artwork and set designs. The troupe’s spacious loft studio ensconced above Construction Junction, a Point Breeze-based repository of reused building materials, is literally a hot box under the July sun.

“We’re using that extreme temperature to our advantage,” she says, noting a correlation between plastics and global warming.

“Historically, plastic has only been available in mass quantities for a short time period, and yet we’ve accumulated so much garbage and junk,” says Porter.

For Hot Box, Porter wrote Patched, a performance-installation with an original score by PJ Roduta, and assigned the choreography to Laura Stokes, who has previously danced with the troupe. She invited newcomer Jasmine Hearn to choreograph Under the Synthetic Shade, a multimedia piece, and is unveiling a new painting, “Tree 3.0,” which will only be on display for the evening as part of her Tree Series.

Porter is not providing the Hot Box audience with playbills, plastic drinking cups or disposable beverage containers. “We’re planning to go 100 percent green. Everything will be recyclable. I’m aiming for a cool yet environmentally sound event.”

(The Space Upstairs, 214 N. Lexington St., Point Breeze. Sat., July 10, 7-11 p.m., ongoing. $8. Info: 412/225-9269, pillowproject.org)