Louise writes in with all the details about an upcoming performance…

Louise Runyon Performance Company will present Language / Listening, an evening of dance, poetry and music, on Friday and Saturday, November 21 and 22 at 8 p.m. at Beacon Hill Arts Center Studio Theatre, 410 W. Trinity Place, Decatur. Tickets are $10 and available at the door. For informat ion and directions: 404-728-8991, www. LouiseRunyonPerformance.com.  Dancers Louise Runyon and Tom Bell will be joined by poet Alice Lovelace (www.alicelovelace.com) and the women’s drumming group ConunDrums (www.conundrums.org), combining the multiple languages of movement, touch, words and drums. Themes include drivenness and connection, mother/daughter relationship, evolution and the natural world, and gardening peace.
The evening will include four dance works. “Chairs: Unseated,” a new duet for Runyon and Bell, intertwines playfulness and compulsion, exploring the competition inherent in musical chairs as well as the seamless give and take of one chair between two people. Runyon and Bell will also present “Wait,” a lecture-demonstration about Contact Improvisation, a dance form in which two partners maintain contact of body surfaces while giving and sharing weight. Runyon will present her new solo, “Garden Peace,” in which she shares a garden harvest with the audience. Bell and Runyon will revive their 2007 “Water Rock Lizard Fire,” exploring evolution and the natural landscape.

Alice Lovelace will perform poems from her just-published book, forever, a collection of personal poems which represent a radical departure from her normally explosive political poetry. These extremely moving poems explore the complex mother/daughter relationship and the loss of Lovelace’s husband and companion of 28 years, Charles “Jikki” Riley. Louise Runyon will present poems from her recent book of poetry, LANDSCAPE / Fear & Love, also dealing with family and the mother/daughter relationship, as well as with the natural world. Both poets will have books for sale.

ConunDrums, the extremely popular, high-energy women’s drumming group, will begin and end the show performing West African rhythms. The show will open the door between artists and community in a number of ways – presented in partnership with Decatur Organic Farmers Market, DOFM will share a fall harvest cornucopia with the audience; ConunDrums will invite people onstage to dance; the lecture-demonstration “Wait” will offer a behind-the scenes view of choreographic process.

Runyon, Bell and Lovelace are all renaissance persons engaged in multiple community and artistic adventures. Bell, Co-Founder and Program Director of the prestigious AJC Decatur Book Festival and former Creative Loafing dance and literary critic, is a novelist and deeply involved in the dance form of Contact Improvisation; he gives pre-show talks for the Atlanta Opera and recently purchased a sewing machine in order to make his own dance pants! Lovelace, the “godmother of Atlanta performance poetry,” is a playwright, teacher, essayist, editor and political activist who performed slam poetry before it was called slam; she was lead organizer of the first United States Social Forum which drew 15,000 people to Atlanta in 2007. Runyon is a veteran dancer, choreographer and poet also dedicated to the cause of eating locally-grown food; she chaired the first-ever Medlock Funky-Elegant Lush Summer Garden Tour in Decatur in 2008. A long-time political activist and the first woman to work at
Atlantic Steel since World War II, Runyon has published two books of poetry and is a practitioner of the Feldenkrais Method® of movement education. ConunDrums had its start in 2001 and plays for festivals, conferences and parades including anti-war marches, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Parade and the Inman Park Festival Parade.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution describes Runyon as “an artistic force to be reckoned with, a woman of substance.” Atlanta poet Collin Kelley says of Lovelace’s new book, “There is a clarity of self and the world she inhabits that is both beautiful and heartbreaking.” This program is supported in part by appropriations from DeKalb County Board of Commissioners and DeKalb County Office of Arts, Culture & Entertainment, and by the Georgia Council for the Arts through the appropriations from the Georgia General Assembly. GCA is a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts.  This event is also funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc.