This year's three-week festival kicks off with three new works from Christine Marie & Ensemble, Mecca Vazie Andrews, and Samantha Goodman.

CHRISTINE MARIE & ENSEMBLE: 4TRAINS (from Signaling Arcana)
Working behind screen and on-stage, Christine Marie and her ensemble of actors and artists construct live shadow theater reminiscent of silent-era cinema and enhanced by hand-built stereoscopic 3D technologies. Her current project of poetic, visual storytelling explores 19th-century American industrialization through the eyes of a young couple. Set to a score by Dan Cantrell, this wordless fable reveals a nation forging full-steam into an unknowable future, one in which notions of time and toil are rapidly changing, and rail lines fuel an expansive transformation of the collective imagination.

MECCA VAZIE ANDREWS: MOLLY MAPS ERRATIC
Part William S. Burroughs and part Whoopi Goldberg, Molly Delilah Roundtree (a.k.a. Mecca Vazie Andrews) attempts to orient others to this decidedly off-kilter world where subcultures collide. In spoken prose both funny and poignant, Andrews' alter-ego speaks from the clear haze of her anxious but perceptive mind, while her ensemble of dancers, the MOVEMENT movement, fight to contain their compassionately rebellious energy. Perceptions shift, music skips and cycles break as Molly Maps Erratic delivers a cathartic, high-energy anthem of liberation and release.

SAMANTHA GOODMAN: DEPTH OF SURFACE
Former Viver Brasil Dance Company member Samantha Goodman dives into the fluid boundary between the present moment and the remembered past in this immersive collaboration with jazz pianist Reggy Woods and cellist Isaac Takeuchi. Goodman's large-scale video projections submerge the stage with reflected images, generating an unstable environment for five dancers as they call forth remembered sensations in their bodies. Merging elements of contemporary Afro-Brazilian and postmodern dancing with live music improvisation, the performers interact at the intersection of rich visual and sonic landscapes.