Friday, April 14th, 2006
at Nexus Gallery

located at 137 N 2nd Street (between Arch and Race)

Featuring  
JANAKI RANPURA (puppeteer; Minneapolis)
KATE DOLLENMAYER (filmmaker; Los Angeles)
JEN HOFER (poet & translator; Los Angeles)

JANAKI RANPURA has been staging puppet pieces since graduating from Yale University in 1998. The current series combines physical theater dynamics as developed in Paris by Jacques Lecoq with shadow play based on Larry Reed's reinvention of Balinese wayang kulit. Her current work explores new relationships between shadow screen, audience, and actor. She is visiting from Minneapolis, where she is working with Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre.

KATE DOLLENMAYER was born in the year of the rabbit.
She is fifteen and makes films in dirt.
She is fifty-five and makes films in a hotel bathroom.
She is thirty-seven and makes films in a diplomatic bag.
Her head is protected by a swarm.  
She has dipped both arms in honey and rolled in salad (she was capturing the salad.) (it's sticking to her by surface tension.).

JEN HOFER is a poet and translator originally from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her recent publications include Sin puertas visibles: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Mexican Women (University of Pittsburgh Press and Ediciones Sin Nombre, 2003), a feature section on contemporary Mexican poetry in the New York-based journal Aufgabe, slide rule (subpress, 2002), and the chapbooks lawless (Seeing Eye Books, 2003) and sexoPUROsexoVELOZ (translations of poetry by Dolores Dorantes, Seeing Eye Books, 2004). Her next books will be a full-length translation of Dorantes’ sexoPUROsexoVELOZ, forthcoming from Kenning Editions and a collaboration written with Patrick Durgin, forthcoming from Atelos. She lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches poetics, works as a court interpreter, and is happily a founding member of the City of Angels Ladies’ Bicycle Association, also known as The Whirly Girls.