Held inside a vacant design showroom at 2919 Manchaca Road, hone \ rile will feature a cast of six dancers animating the themes of frustration and obstruction BLiPSWiTCH first explored last year as part of 11:11: the modern dance series by Jennifer Sherburn and Natalie George Productions. That series, which won a 2017 Critics Table Award from the Austin Chronicle and a national grant from New Music USA, staged 11 dances in 11 months in unconventional performance spaces all over Austin, from Community First! Village, to Live Oak Brewing Company, to KC Grey Home, to Dimension Gallery, and many more. For 11:11:08, which debuted May 2017, Sherburn and BLiPSWiTCH co-founder Taryn Lavery teamed up to create the evening-length work Roheline, which took as its cues the sculptural art and industrial setting of Dimension, using the environment’s natural sounds – traffic, truck deliveries, distant conversations – as its score.

Now, hone \ rile will pick up on the friction between the material world and an idealized reality for a four-night run.

Inspired by exhaustion, struggle, and repeated failure, as well as themes from the philosophical parable “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, the dancers of hone \ rile will seek to embody persistence through repetition, born not only out of necessity, but of desire for a more perfect result. As the dance takes audience members through a labyrinth of limitations, struggle, and turbulence in search of rebirth and hope, it will also prompt fundamental questions: What beauty may we find in these patterns of failure and impermanence? Is it possible that over time there exists a distillation more pure in form than the original? hone / rile seeks to explore these questions and ideas through stamina, dynamism, tenderness, and vulnerability.

With lighting design by Chris Conard (2017 Austin Critics Table award winner, Best Set Design) and an original composition featuring synthesizers, programmed rhythms, field recordings, and ambient space by Solid State Dream Suit’s Michael Brown and Alan Kahler, audience members will sit around the space, with partially deconstructed walls offering obstructions reminiscent of Roheline. Dancers will explore the exhaustion of possibility alongside a live score inspired by both the calm silences, and sometimes abrasive industrial soundscape, of the previous work.

hone \ rile received a 2018 artist grant from Jennifer Sherburn and made possible by the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department.