Vermont Dancers Lida Winfield and Ellen Smith Ahern Unveil New Work, "Long Gone"

Saturday & Sunday, September 15 & 16 at 7 pm, FlynnSpace

This new collaboration from Lida Winfield and Ellen Smith Ahern intricately blends movement and spoken word to celebrate funny, heartfelt, and irreverent stories. Weaving storytelling and dance, Long Gone explores questions of memory, lineage, and identity: How do the dead live on through memory and imagination? And to what extent does our understanding of the present depend upon our connection to the past?

Lida Winfield creates solo work that merges storytelling, dance, and visual art to create captivating, poignant performances.In 2010, she joined Tiffany Rhynard’s company Big ACTION Performance Ensemble and begin to make duet work with performer Ellen Smith Ahern. Her work is interdisciplinary, merging artist mediums with social and emotional issues. Lida explores issues of multiculturalism, nonverbal communication, socioeconomic divides, privilege, the search for place or home, disabilities, education, and access.

Ellen Smith Ahern grew up dancing in Illinois and came east to earn her B.A. in dance at Middlebury College. She’s worked with many fabulous artists, including Amy Chavasse, El Circo Contemporaneo, and Jane Comfort & Company and has performed throughout Cuba, Qatar, Mexico, and the US. Her work seeks to engage us with physical immediacy and detail while offering glimpses of a more expansive world, a world with its own humor, history, and future. She’s inspired by the wilderness, the news, the quiet details of everyday life, the work of other artists, and the limitless human capacity to transform.