Event Title and Artist: Fairy Sighting with Amelia Garretson-Persans
Date: August 29
Time: 7:00PM – 9:00PM
Location: All Gathering Stones events will be held at Fish Point on the Eastern Promenade, Portland, Maine. See location on Google Maps.
About the Event
Fairy Sighting is an opportunity for visitors to experience something magical in their peripheral vision. Using light, shadow and performance, Fairy Sighting plays with the relationship between magic and theater and our desire to be taken in by mystery. One night only, looped live performance in and around the stones. Choreography collaboration from Dana Dotson.
About the Artist
Amelia Garretson-Persans is an interdisciplinary artist, community collaborator, and mother based in Maine. She received her BFA in Studio Art from Concordia University in Montreal and her MFA from the Maine College of Art in Portland, ME. She has shown work in Maine, New York, Tennessee, Quebec and elsewhere. Her residencies include the Digital Narratives residency at the Banff Centre in Alberta and the Stephen Pace House in Stonington. She lives in South Portland with her partner and frequent collaborator, Ian P. Hundt, and two children, Paul and Lily.
Event Title and Artist: Gloaming with Riley Watts and Heather Lyon
Date: August 20
Time: 7-9pm
Location: All Gathering Stones events will be held at Fish Point on the Eastern Promenade, Portland, Maine. See location on Google Maps.
About the Event
Gloaming refers to the transitional time between day at night – the liminal space between the light of wakefulness and the dark of a sleeping world. You’ll be invited to participate in a short meditation followed by a performance in a distinct atmosphere energized by the performers and their connection. Each stone will be activated as a choreographic “station” that will guide you toward empathetic healing after an intense year of isolation.
About the Artists
Heather Lyon is a performance, video and installation artist born and working in Blue Hill, Maine. Combining her interest in the meanings of materials (ranging from rebar to sequins to milk to ash) and the question of the human body, she investigates relationships and the ways in which we negotiate longing, loss, desire, and vulnerability. She holds a BFA (2002) and MFA (2004) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has recently been exhibited and performed at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, Maine, TEDx Dirigo, Portland, Maine,
The Danforth Gallery, University of Maine Augusta, Cynthia Winings Gallery, Blue Hill, Maine, Space Gallery,
Portland, Maine, Zaratan, Lisbon, Portugal, “The Picnic Pavilion” a parallel project to the 58th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, The State Silk Museum, Tbilisi, Georgia and at Artisterium 10, Tbilisi, Georgia, for which she received an Emergency Artist Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York.
Riley Watts is a dance artist based in Portland, Maine. He studied dance at the Walnut Hill School for the Arts and The Juilliard School, where graduated in 2007 as a Princess Grace Award winner. He has danced professionally with Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, Bern Ballet, Netherlands Dance Theater 2, and The Forsythe Company, and now freelances from his home state of Maine. He has appeared in numerous works of choreographer William Forsythe both on stage and in museums since 2010, including video work Alignigung with Rubberlegz, A Quiet Evening of Dance and Sylvie Guillem’s Life in Progress farewell tour. In Forsythe’s DUO2015, Riley and Brigel Gjoka were named Contemporary Dancers of the Year by the Positano Prize, Italy 2015. He has toured the world extensively to perform in venues such as the Sydney Opera House, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and National Theater of Taiwan, and the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, among many others. His choreography has been performed at Bates Dance Festival, SPACE, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, and the Bangor Arts Exchange.
As a dance artist, Riley’s own work centers around states of consciousness through the body in motion and the psychology of dance. His art practice begins with dance but spans various media and modes of making, including improvisation, video art, sculpture, music, and live installations. Riley has been an artist-in-residence at SPACE Gallery, Bates Dance Festival, Hewnoaks Artist Colony, and the Ellis Beauregard Foundation, and since 2010 has been invited throughout the USA, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, and the UK to teach improvisation and embodied dance thinking.
