About

Bring On The Lumière is an evening-length multimedia dance-theater-light installation in which the Lumière Brothers, the French founders of cinema, find themselves trapped inside their own films.  The work is a collaboration between choreographer/director Catherine Galasso and lighting designer/ installation artist Elaine Buckholtz, and will premiere in San Francisco in 2011, followed by a New York performance in 2012.  The brothers are played by Bay Area dance divas Christine Bonansea and Marina Fukushima.  The project is currently in its earliest stage of development.  Read the project description here.

Catherine Galasso’s motivation has been to find a unique mode of expression that extends beyond traditional boundaries between media. She combines the ephemeral qualities of performance with the illusive permanence of film and video in order to create cutting-edge and provocative narratives. Although her pieces differ greatly in theme and execution, they are for the most part based on modern myth and idiosyncratic stories that inspire and move her. In terms of content, the eclectic pieces that constitute Catherine’s body of work are united by an ongoing fascination with stories of human struggle.

Catherine is a current Artist-in-Residence at San Francisco’s ODC Theater, a three-year engagement, by invitation of ODC Theater Director Rob Bailis.  She has received funding from the Zellerbach Family Foundation and the Bossak Heilbron Charitable Foundation, as well as commissions from ODC, Duo Theater, and the San Francisco Film Society.  Recent engagements include performances at Dance New Amsterdam and Danspace Project, and a residency with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.  In November 2009 she premiered “Show Me The Money,” an evening-length, site-specific dance theater piece for a former bank vault on Wall Street.