POST: DUOS Performance

Sarah Rowe’s POST exhibition collaboration event, with friends, dance, and music featuring Lauren Simpson and Annie Schenzel.

Dance duo Lauren Simpson and Annie Schenzel join cellist David Downing and oboist Darci Gamerl of Bel Canto Duo for a playful immersion of movement and sound at KANEKO. The duos create a reflective soundscape and partially improvised dance performance in response to the treehouse structure, POST, created by artist Sarah Rowe.

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Lauren Simpson is an Omaha-based choreographer and educator. She created Moving Truck, a mobile and socially-distanced show performed on front lawns at residences throughout Omaha in 2020. Recent projects include Smithereens, a site specific performance in Joslyn Art Museum with music by Omaha musician Miwi LaLupa, Celestial Real Estate, a collaborative performance at Generator Space gallery featuring local artists Nick Miller (painter), Celeste Butler (textile designer), and Dereck Higgins (musician), and Self-Leveling a performance at ODC Theater San Francisco in collaboration with dancer Galen Rogers and visual artist Emma Strebel. Collaboration across disciplines is at the heart of her art making.

A recent transplant from San Francisco, Lauren maintains close ties with the Bay Area. She was an ODC Artist in Residence from 2018-2022. She danced for MacArthur Genius choreographer Liz Lerman and New York City/Oakland-based choreographer Risa Jaroslow. Lauren has taught dance at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, Harvard College and University of San Francisco. She serves on the board of Amplify Arts. Lauren has an M.F.A. from the University of Colorado-Boulder, Ed.M. from Harvard University, and B.A. from Carleton College.

Artist Statement: Lauren’s creative interests lie at the intersection of bodies and objects. She primarily identifies as a choreographer but her work is an equal parts combination of things, spaces, and people and therefore her collaborators are often visual artists and architects. Together they create performances which speak to the agency of things and the materiality of the body. Through choreography she embodies the physical world of things as an antidote to our heavily virtual and mediated existence. Her approach to choreography includes the accumulation of hundreds of vernacular gestural movements and applying precision, idiosyncratic rhythms, and detail to shape it. In doing so, everyday banal actions are elevated offering a new aesthetic attention to what is often overlooked. (Photo credit Ben Semisch)

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Annie Alice Schenzel was born and raised in Omaha. She began seriously studying dance in Austin, TX in 2009. During this time, she participated in the American Dance Festival and was selected to perform work by Robert Battle. In 2012, she moved to New York City where she continued her dance pursuits as she interned for Movement Research. While in New York, she worked with Asako Miyahira and participated in the Hunter College dance program. In 2016, she returned to Omaha where she now teaches 5th and 6th grade in Omaha Public Schools. She has been a company member and contributing choreographer of tbd. dance collective since 2016. She is also the Communications and Marketing Director as well as a board member for the collective.

Artist Statement: The act of creating and performing dance has always felt like a privilege for Annie. Oftentimes her work is an expression of gratitude and joy. She aims to create dance for its healing power, as well as the physical high it gives the dancer while practicing and performing. She is inspired by natural and constructed places, the human connection, and music that makes your heart rumble. (Photo credit Ben Semisch)