Kore Press collaborates with NEW ARTiculations Dance Theater to create THE INVISIBLE CITY, a 5-week, site-specific, experimental arts lab exploring public space in Downtown Tucson. See the project's blog here.

For four weekends, beginning in mid-October, 2008, a cadre of women writers will join New ART dancers to create texts and dances within the downtown urban environment in response to constraints, prompts, or thematic ideas put forth by the project directors and fellow artists. Also joining the team are Beth Weinstein, a professor of architecture at the University of Arizona, whose research focuses on the intersections between architecture and choreography; multi-instrumentalist, Vicki Brown; and documentary filmmaker, Jamie Lee, who will film all the lab sessions.

Working collaboratively, the multi-genre ensemble will collect the "results" from each session, or lab experiment, in the forms of writing, movement, sound and video. Lab experiments will be shaped by artists' ideas, interdisciplinary discoveries, public involvement, and the site itself.

Re-Visioning Downtown Tucson

The Invisible City project seeks to contribute to current conversations about the changing downtown landscape and the role of arts and culture in creating economic growth and regional identity. As urban growth in Tucson prioritizes highways and tract housing developments over central plazas, affordable live/workspaces, and desert landscape, public space becomes decentralized, dehumanized, and "invisible." Given the lack of accessible pathways for human contact and communication in our desert city, the project asks women to offer a new perspective of "city" through participation, engagement and collaboration.

Some guiding questions are:

What new perspectives can women artists offer a city in flux?
How might cross-genre artistic collaboration offer a model for creative diplomacy?
How does artistic practice and performance influence how we experience public space?
How does our relationship with public space and one another influence how we move through and experience city?

How to See The Invisible City:

All Invisible City "experiments" will be open and visible to the public. Some audience participation will be invited. Outdoor spaces include parking lots, city sidewalks, intersections, and vacant lots. Indoor lab spaces include the Design Lab studio, 174 E. Toole Ave., and Dinnerware, 264 E. Congress, among others.

Each week audiences will find a schedule and map of where to view the artists at work at the Design Lab studio, 174 E. Toole Ave and on our websites. Additionally, a mailbox with comment postcards at each lab site will be invite viewers to "post" real-time responses to the artists' work as well as share their own ideas about public space downtown.

The Invisible City lab results will be unveiled in a culminating experiment atop the Parkwise Pennington Street Parking Garage, Nov. 14-16, 2008.

The Invisible City DATES

Kick-off on PARK(ing) Day

Friday, Sept. 19, 9 am-5 pm

Open labs
Sundays, Oct. 19, 2-6 pm
Friday, Oct. 24, 5-7 pm
Saturday, Oct. 25, 7-9 pm (Downtown Saturday Night)
Sunday, Oct. 26, 2-6 pm
Friday, Oct. 31, 5-7 pm
Sunday, Nov. 2, 2-6 pm
Friday, Nov. 7, 5-7 pm
Sunday, Nov. 9, 2-6 pm

(Suggested donation $5/lab to participate, $2 to watch)

Final results
Friday, Nov. 14: Open "dress rehearsal," 5:30 pm, Parkwise Parking Garage at Pennington between Scott Ave. and Sixth Ave. (Suggested donation: $5)

Saturday, Nov. 15: Raw footage film of lab processes, Dusk, TBA (Suggested donation: $5)

Sunday, Nov. 16: Performance, 5:30 pm, Top floor of Parkwise Parking Garage at Pennington between Scott Ave. and Sixth Ave. Plenty of parking below!