Dean Ozuzu to present “Project Tool” installation at Chicago Cultural Center January 25-February 8, 2018

News Office Staff / Jan 11, 2018

School of Fine and Performing Arts Dean and Dance Professor Onye Ozuzu will present her durational performance installation titled “Project Tool” at the Chicago Cultural Center from January 25 through February 8.

As Ozuzu puts it, the project examines and showcases the “inter-relationships between body, task, and tool.”

An opening reception will be held on Thursday, January 25 at 5:30 p.m. Performances will be on Friday, February 2, at 5:30 p.m., and Saturday, February 3, at 2 p.m.

Ozuzu collaborated with designer Steve Silber to build a collection of sprung wood dance floors—modular, hexagonal, and changeable dance platforms that can be configured into different types of spaces for performance art. “The act of building this floor explores the use of tools as if they are partners in a dance with the body,” says Ozuzu. “This project carries on through my body and the bodies of other dancers… [it gives] the opportunity to channel that practicality into our artistic practices…to stand strong in the embodied fact that we can literally build our own platforms.”

The Chicago Tribune featured Ozuzu and her upcoming endeavor, noting that the installation’s “layer of movement and design tracks back to an ancestral memory of the bodies that built the literal foundation under their feet.”

Ozuzu is a recipient of a 2017-18 National Performance Network Creation and Development Fund. The fund awarded 20 recipients a total of $50,000 to support development of works across disciplines, geographies, and cultures. “Project Tool” is supported by a 2016 Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist grant, a 3Arts Project Award, and is commissioned by Links Hall in Chicago and Dancing Grounds in New Orleans.

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