Press

“McConneloug’s “She Captains” unfolds in an enormous warehouse, as intrepid fems meet industrial ambiance.  Using its vast spaces to unite the grit and sensuality of Grace O’Malley and her fellow buccaneers with  the vacant melancholy of the Elizabethan court, McConneloug creates an ambiance both bawdy and poetic.  Here is movement theater that animates the story of two women—O’Malley and her sister-under-the-skin Elizabeth I—with a visceral sense of all women who swash and buckle their way through a man’s world. McConneloug’s theatrical marvels—from dancers jigging in sand, bouncing in farthingales, spitting up pearls and, finally, drowning serenely in enchanted pools of water—creates a complex and compelling world.”
Linda Shapiro, Dance critic, Minneapolis

“Shawn McConneloug and her Orchestra have quite a history of telling unusual tales in visually compelling ways ... ‘SHE Captains’ looks at the life of [Pirate Captain Grace] O’Malley through a mixture of dance and film, with an eye toward the way pirates have been seen by children’s books, Hollywood and seafaring romance novels.”
Max Sparber, Pulse of The Twin Cities
>full article (PDF)

“We found we were both attracted to that moment in a girl’s life when she practically dies because she’s seduced by the desire to be seductive,” Hall said. “Pirates provided a new way of talking about this, about that part of any person that needs to cross boundaries, to transgress, in order to be fully alive.”
Camille Lefevre, The Star Tribune
>full article (PDF)

<back

Shawn McConneloug and her Orchestra* was founded in the Twin Cities in 1993. McConneloug combines contemporary dance, words, music, film and/or video to create visually stimulating environments that enlighten and entertain. The company designs work for today’s over-stimulated world, where consumers are largely unconscious of the choices made for them by television, film, and other media forms. McConneloug uses these accessible and trusted mediums with movement as their language, in her exploration of the world in which we live.

*orchestra (or’kistre)(<L<Gk orchestra dancing space<orcheesthai to dance)

<back

Shawn McConneloug Biography

Shawn McConneloug has been choreographing and performing since 1982. From 1974-83, she was a producer for documentaries, industrial films, and television commercials. An original member of Zenon Dance Company in Minneapolis, McConneloug was also instrumental in designing and organizing the first touring program for the company. In 1987, McConneloug left Zenon to work in Italy. There, she expanded her choreographic vocabulary and approach to creating new work. In 1989, she staged Il Lamento Blu at Teatro Romano in Verona. In 1990, she returned to Minneapolis and co-founded SpaceSpace, a rehearsal/performance venue that for many years presented a highly popular cabaret giving artists a chance to experiment with new directions in their work before an audience. In 1991, she co-founded Figura Productions with filmmaker Greg Cummins, a Minneapolis-based production company that makes short films using movement as their primary language. In 1993, McConneloug formed Shawn McConneloug and her Orchestra*, a unique theater of movement, media, raw emotion…and humor.

Over the past ten years, McConneloug has created twelve performance works that have been presented to great acclaim at several venues in the Twin Cities area, at Dance Theatre Workshop in New York, and on tour. In 1996, the Walker Art Center commissioned McConneloug to create a piece in conjunction with the museum’s Hannah Hoch exhibit. The ensuing work, Tina Concertina…vera incessu patuit dea, was subsequently presented at the Miami Light Project’s renowned Contemporary Dance Series where it was greeted with enthusiasm by critics and audiences alike. In early 1999, she created What’s Wrong with Wanting to Die in Your Arms?… An Opera-Inspired Nightmare as part of the Walker Art Center/Southern Theater distinguished Out There Series.
McConneloug has received numerous awards and fellowships including, a National Endowment for the Arts Choreographer’s Fellowship and a prestigious Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship. Since 1991, she has received eight distinguished McKnight Artist Fellowships, six for choreography and 2 for her interdisciplinary work. In 2003, she received a National Dance Project grant to develop a new work for touring. In December 2001, the Minneapolis City Pages named McConneloug Artist of the Year. In doing so, Linda Shapiro wrote:

Shawn McConneloug jump-starts her movement theater pieces by looking for something that scares her. Blessed with an incurably operatic sensibility, she creates emotional sizzlers about doomed relationships, faded memories, repressed libidos. But while her heart palpitates shamelessly on her sleeve, she keeps her frequently wicked tongue firmly in cheek…A refreshingly independent spirit in an increasingly funder- and presenter-driven arts environment, McConneloug insists on doing things her own way.

Articles about her work have appeared in such publications as The New York Times, The Village Voice, The St. Paul Pioneer Press, and The Miami Herald. Deborah Jowitt in the New York Times called her “rambunctious…original and beguiling.” Mike Steele writing for the StarTribune has called her work “witty, brainy, totally disarming...”

In addition to her choreographic work, McConneloug has collaborated with Greg Cummins to develop films and videos that have been presented at over 15 dance and film festivals across the U.S. and Europe, including the Sundance Festival in Utah and Dance Screen in Vienna. In 1993, their film, It’s Like Lies, was one of only eleven American short films presented in the La Nuit du Court Métrage Américain à Monaco Festival.

McConneloug’s recent works include Palace of Dreams: 21st Century Vaudeville, an homage to the vaudeville and film houses of the early 20th century, and Stand On Your Man, bringing “cowboygirls” together to pay tribute to Country Western music, film, and culture. In summer 2003, the Orchestra toured Palace of Dreams to Central America as part of the new La Red initiative, based on the National Performance Network model.

In 2000, McConneloug choreographed Verdi’s Macbeth for The Minnesota Opera. In 2002, she participated in a national workshop/conference at the White Oak Plantation with other major dance artists and presenters about the state of dance in America. As a Cowles Chair with the University of Minnesota in the fall of 2003, Shawn worked with University students recreating her phenomenal piece that reflects on a Catholic upbringing, Corporal Mortification.

SHE Captains, a swashbuckling tale of peril on the high femme seas, premiered in June of 2006 in a nontraditional theatrical venue (a 35,000 square foot warehouse space in northeast Minneapolis). Featuring the Orchestra’s trademark combination of live performance and film, SHE Captains takes its audience on a wild journey of initiation imaginatively skewered to a real life pirate Queen, the sixteen century Irish seafaring captain Grace O’Malley. This marks McConneloug’s first collaboration with Minneapolis-based writer, archetypal psychologist, and theatre-artist Nor Hall. In 2007, SHE Captains will travel to Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center for the Gasparilla Festival (in honor of José Gaspar, Gulf Coast pirate).

<back

Repertory

SHE Captains - a swashbuckling tale of peril on the high femme seas! (70 minutes)

SHE Captains is Shawn McConneloug’s passionate swashbuckling tale of adventure and bravery featuring live performance, film, and musical arrangements ranging from stately Elizabethan court music to Irish rock and roll. This daring work is based on the real life story of Grace O’Malley, an inspiring female Irish pirate who gleefully and violently defied the gender expectations of her day. SHE Captains has been designed for and takes place in mysterious environs revealed to audiences at each site. Probing the depths of those who take on traditional, submissive roles and those who fearlessly forge ahead in spite of cultural expectations, this all-female presentation invites audiences to discover a magical world of wind, sails and danger, of peg legs, walking the plank, and ships known as “she.”

“McConneloug’s ‘SHE Captains’ unfolds in an enormous warehouse, as intrepid fems meet industrial ambiance. Using its vast spaces to unite the grit and sensuality of Grace O’Malley and her fellow buccaneers with the vacant melancholy of the Elizabethan court, McConneloug creates an ambiance both bawdy and poetic. Here is movement theater that animates the story of two women—O’Malley and her sister-under-the-skin Elizabeth I—with a visceral sense of all women who swash and buckle their way through a man’s world. McConneloug’s theatrical marvels—from dancers jigging in sand,
bouncing in farthingales, spitting up pearls and, finally, drowning serenely in enchanted pools of water—creates a complex and compelling world.”

- Linda Shapiro, Minneapolis

Built for non-proscenium presentations
70 minutes in length
Touring company of 11 (9 performers, 1 AD, 1 crew)
One local guest performer
Minimum 6,000 square foot space required
Mobile Audiences of 100

<back