DYNASTY HANDBAG and TENDER FOREVER

LIVE PERFORMANCE

Friday, November 18th 2011
8pm
$8

Please joins us for a performance by New York based performance and video artist Jibz Cameron (Dynasty Handbag) and musical perfomer Tender Forever

Jibz Cameron (Dynasty Handbag) is a performance and video artist who lives and works in New York. Her work has been seen institutions large and important and small and also important. Dynasty Handbag performances have been heralded by the New York Times as “the funniest and most pitch perfect performance seen in years” and a “crackpot genius” by the Village Voice. She is the recipient of the 2007 Fresh Tracks Artist in Residency Award at Dance Theater Workshop, 2008 recipient of the Franklin Furnace Fund grant for the performing arts, the 2010 Dixon Place Mondo Cane! commission, and the 2010 Kindle Artist Grant. She is currently an adjunct professor of Performance Composition at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Performance Studies Department. She is currently working on an upcoming production with The Wooster Group, to be presented in 2012.

“Tender Forever comes along in tough times. Nobody can ignore the dark places we’ve watched the world go in the past few years. But as divisions grows in the world, so does our ability to connect. Ours is a world exploding with communication and Tender Forever sits neatly in the center of that explosion. Lots of flights and some missed phone calls, friends here, lovers there. Missed connections and connections made. Melanie Valera’s Franco-American pop project spans nationalities and leaps forward towards a world where we can close the gaps between countries, ideologies and ultimately hearts. Move closer.

Valera was born in 1977, the year of the punk, and spent her formative years in the village of Maurr, in south west France. As often happens, this small town kid pushed past the restrictions of that kind of environment, out into the larger world. In this case the city of Bordeaux and the University Michel de Montaigne of Arts. Her years in Bordeaux saw her developing an aesthetic that would transfer into her first musical projects the Bonnies, and later, Garrison Rocks. Armed with girl group and R&B classics The Bonnies took on the streets of Bordeaux, and with the partnership of a Californian band mate and intelligent, soulful pop Garrison Rocks took on Melanie’s expanding world.

Tender Forever became Melanie’s project in 2003, a solo effort which simplified and concentrated her music. A laptop, a long mic cord and almost too much enthusiasm was all it took. Tender Forever from the start was as much an experience as a band. That girl with the mic moves with passion, pounds out fear, falls to her knees, cranks up the visuals and passes it off to you. All of this quickly led her out of Bordeaux to the gentle state of Washington and that weird, weird city of Olympia. New friends and collaborators of a like mind (including Mirah, The Blow, Anna Oxygen and Calvin Johnson) kept it a busy summer. These new connections would be the beginning of a Northwest/Bordeaux connection sending bands back and forth, and further establishing Melanie’s new intercontinental artistic life.