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Live Artery studio showing of Bill Shannon’s “Touch Update,” for Live Feed theatre showing click here.
Known for creating groundbreaking choreography that explores the social constructions surrounding disabled bodies, Bill Shannon’s latest work combines movement, wearable projection technology, and video installation to explore the significant and subtle implications of physical human contact in the digital era. Touch Update “reverse engineers” Shannon’s virtuosic technique for dancing on crutches, as he dissects and dismantles the multiple online identities we create in order to mask and manipulate our lived experience. Featuring performance on crutches of Shannon Technique by Cirque Du Soleil artist Raphael Nepomuceno.
Bill Shannon is an interdisciplinary artist and maker who explores body-centric work through video installation, sculpture, linguistics, sociology, choreography, dance and politics. Bill has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Choreography, a Foundation For Contemporary Art Fellowship in Performance Art, and has worked as a choreographer and performer for Cirque Du Soleil. Bill’s contributions to dance include a very specific movement vocabulary evolved through his creative use of crutches as a child after the discovery of a physical disability that effected his ability to bear weight in his hips. Bill’s subsequent immersion in the emergent youth cultures of hip-hop and skateboarding further contributed to his autodidactic form on crutches. Shannon eventually moved to New York City and became a fixture at underground dance clubs, where he fused his history of childhood play on crutches with his contemporary kinetic expressions of hip-hop and skateboarding. The result of this fusion was a singular style of mobility, performance art and dance that required multiple new designs and fabrications of modified crutches to sustain technical advances in his movement practices.
