Push Up Something Hidden presents "Balls to Balzac" at CELLspace

Choreographer Amy Lewis, artistic director of Push Up Something Hidden, premieres her performance art dance lecture, "Balls to Balzac: A Journey from Testicles to Women in the Bourbon Restoration," at CELLspace this weekend, December 5th, at 8pm. With this new work, Lewis continues to cross genres.

"Balls to Balzac" centers on the use of "balls" as slang, the term's relationship to Balzac, and Balzac's portrayal of 19th century society women. Using Power Point, text, visuals, and an accumulative movement score, Lewis examines three heroines from three separate Balzac novels, arousing notions of masculinity, profanity, and gender inequality. 

Honore de Balzac was a 19th century French novelist and playwright most noted for his grand work, "The Human Comedy." He is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. Despite Balzac's prominence in the annals of literary history, he endured a swarm of professional and personal failures during his lifetime, as many posthumous biographies have detailed. However, Lewis is less interested in Balzac than the centuries worth of contradictory texts that have been written about him - some affirming his brilliance and worth, and others, renouncing him entirely. She asks the question, what can one learn about today’s world by examining Balzac and his contested place in history?  

Lewis employs a variety of disciplines to distill her message, but it all began with movement maps - a sort of choreographic blueprinting method that Lewis often utilizes in her work. These maps allow her to translate historical research into a movement system that resonates with everyday, modern life. Indeed, Lewis is primarily concerned with the daily, mundane events in one’s life that are often overlooked or not considered noteworthy, and she continually seeks out new ways to capture the abstract, extraordinary aspects of those moments.