The Unreliable Bestiary – Wolf

The Unreliable Bestiary – Wolf

Deke Weaver (School of Art and Design and Department of Theater, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Monday, April 14 / 1:30 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

WOLF is Deke Weaver’s third performance in his life-long project, The Unreliable Bestiary – a performance for each letter of the alphabet, each letter represented by an endangered species or habitat. In September 2013 people were loaded onto buses and driven 40 minutes out to a little forest in the middle of the Illinois cornfields.  During the bus ride, park rangers gave video-accompanied talks about wolves.  The rangers told some stories and sang some songs and taught people how to howl.  They told the people on the bus about the pack of wolves that had been released into the tiny forest and about their contact with the first recorded Star Wolves on our planet.  The buses arrived at the small forest just as the sun was going down.  The audience was divided into four herds.  The rangers led the Bison, the Deer, the Elk and the Moose on silent walks through the woods, everyone’s eyes peeled for wolves. The herds made their way to the Ground Zero source of The Energy: a barn filled with The Dance, The Sound, and The Story that pulled the threads together. The event at IHC (co-directed by choreographer/performer Jennifer Allen and writer/performer/media-artist Deke Weaver with sound composed/designed by Chris Peck) distills the sprawling 2013 piece into a one-man presentation – part live performance, part cinematic documentation.

Deke Weaver is a writer, performer, designer, and media artist. His interdisciplinary performances and videos have been presented in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Russia, Europe, and the United States at experimental theater, film/video, dance, solo performance, and broadcast venues such as Channel 4/U.K., the Sundance Film Festival, the New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center, The Berlin Video Festival, the Museum of Contemporary Art/LA, The Moth, and many others including livestock pavilions, night clubs, backyard sheds and living rooms. He has been a resident artist at Yaddo, Isle Royale National Park, HERE, Ucross, and the MacDowell Colony. His work has been supported by commissions, fellowships, and grants from Creative Capital, the city of San Francisco, the states of Illinois and New York, the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), and other public and private foundations. He is currently an associate professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign with appointments in the School of Art and Design and Department of Theater.

Sponsored by the IHC, the Dept. of Art, the Dept. of Theater and Dance, the Dept. of English,  and the Interspecies Collaboration Project.
Website: http://unreliablebestiary.org/wolf