DOUG HAYKO Actor, writer, director, performance artist and founder of omahaliveartdivision, Doug Hayko returns for his third collaboration with the Bemis Center. His performance Far Away in the Orchard was held at the Bemis Underground in 2005 and he curated an exhibition for the space in 2007 entitled East of 72nd: Disrupting the Omaha Landscape in Six Acts. His OT08 ensemble performance at the inaugural New Ways/New Works Festival at the University of Nebraska at Omaha earlier this year won rave reviews from the City Weekly, which praised it as “hypnotic” in its “maddeningly mesmerizing monotony.” For Bemis08: Creativity Festival, Hayko will create a new series of site-specific live art events on the periphery of the Bemis Center campus.
DAVID MATYSIAK Bemis Center resident David Matysiak is a songwriter, singer and guitarist for the Omaha rock band Coyote Bones. In Telephono, his most recent endeavor, Matysiak sends songs into cyberspace to be modified, mutated and sometimes even maligned before being returned by often-times random composers and musicians in a project that explores the outer limits of what it means to collaborate.
OMAHA MODERN DANCE COLLECTIVE
& UNO'S THE MOVING COMPANY Taffy Howard and Kathy Bass of the Omaha Modern Dance Collective and Josie Metal-Corbin of UNO’s The Moving Company will collaborate to bring modern dance to the Bemis Center). The OMDC is an independent organization that works with the area-wide dance community to pool resources for the development of modern dance. Founded in 1935, The Moving Company is the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s internationally recognized modern dance group. Metal-Corbin was named 2004’s College/University Dance Educator of the Year by the National Dance Association for her work with the intergenerational company whose mission is to create new works and to restage historical pieces. The groups will be collaborating at Bemis08: Creativity Festival to develop a site-specific exploration of the power and poetry of the human form that responds directly responds to Therman Statom’s Gallery 1 exhibition, Nascita.
SHELTERBELT THEATRE For almost fifteen years, the Shelterbelt Theatre has been producing award-winning and crowd-pleasing new plays by local writers. Scott Working, founder and artistic director of the Shelterbelt, will be presenting Micro Theatre, a series of short, original dramatic works that will feature many of the most talented writers and actors in the area. Working is also a member of the theater faculty at Metro Community College.
SUSANN SUPRENANT A founding member of BlueBarn’s Witching Hour, Susann Suprenant has been creating contemporary performance projects in collaboration with Omaha area artists for the past eight years, including scripted plays, stage adaptations, devised theatre, and site-specific performances. Her collaborations focus on movement-based training and performance composition, often in response to mythological and canonical imagery. A recent participant in the popular Slide Jam series at the Bemis Center, her Bemis08: Creativity Festival work is an attempt to offer renewal and to honor the personal cost of the creative process in an interactive installation that explores themes of exile, ritual, and community.
