FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 11/14/2011 Contact: Bonnie Stein, GOH Productions [email protected]

The School of Hard Knocks PRESENTS Occupation Layer: PALESTINE December 7 – 10, 2011; 1-6pm

Performances: Dec 8-10th 7-9 pm $10.00

Installation by Yoshiko Chuma

Photographs by Robert Flynt

Gallery Onetwentyeight 128 Rivington Street, New York, NY 10002 212.674.0244 www.galleryonetwentyeight.org

ABOUT THE PROJECT

Yoshiko Chuma and Robert Flynt have been collaborating periodically for 30 years. In April 2011 they were in Ramallah for one month, immersed in a daily rehearsal process with 30 dancers and choreographers from the Palestinian dance troupe El-Funoun. Flynt worked simultaneously alongside Chuma interacting with the members of the El-Funoun Dance Troupe to generate a body of photographs.

The project continues Chuma’s lifetime fascination with cross-cultural dialogue. Chuma first came to the Middle East in 2008 to work with artists and of various socioeconomic backgrounds and geographic origins from Jordan. Using the notion of Palestine as a mirror to the devastation in Japan, Chuma seeks to address, in abstract terms, the notion of dislocation in general; and how to maintain identity separate from one’s homeland in the face of cultural or psychological alienation.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

Japan-born Yoshiko Chuma is a three-time Bessie award-winner who has been based in New York since 1978. Over the past 30 years, her company The School of Hard Knocks, she has created and performed over 45 original works and site-specific events in the United States, Asia, and Europe, with a particular focus on Eastern European countries, including Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, the Baltic Republics, and Bosnia. Chuma is the recipient of several fellowships and awards, including those from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Japan Foundation, Meet the Composer Choreographer/Composer Commission and Philip Morris New Works. She has led workshops and master classes throughout Eastern and Western Europe, Asia, Russia and the U.S.

Robert Flynt’s work has been widely exhibited in the United States and abroad since 1980. It has been shown in major museums, galleries, and alternative spaces, as well as in collaborative performance and dance projects worldwide. In 1992 he was included in “New Photography 8” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where his work is in the permanent collection, as well as in the Metropolitan Museum, The International Center of Photography (NY), and L.A. County Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston , among many others. Flynt received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Light Work, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, and Art Matters, and most recently the Bogliasco Foundation residency fellowship in Italy. With choreographer Pavel Zustiak, he received a Baryshnikov Residency grant in NYC for 2010 for the project Amidst, which premiered there in 2011.

The one-month residency in Ramallah by The School of Hard Knocks received support from foundations in Japan, Palestine, Jordan and the US, including major support from the Japan Foundation, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation and A.M Qattan Foundation’s Performing Arts Development Project, plus additional support from El-Funoun Dance Troupe, Popular Arts Center, GOH Productions, Al Hussein Theater and King’s Academy.

Links:

Yoshiko Chuma and The School of Hard Knocks: http://www.yoshikochuma.org/

Robert Flynt: http://www.robertflynt.com

El-Funoun Dance Troupe: http://www.el-funoun.org/about/about.html

gallery onetwentyeight: http://galleryonetwentyeight.org

Yoshiko Chuma 201 East 4th Street NY NY 10009 212 533 9473 e: [email protected] url: www.yoshikochuma.org