ELIZABETH YOCHIM

Elizabeth Yochim is a performance artist, dancer, art historian and art world professional. She has a degree in Italian Renaissance Art History from the University of Michigan and for ten years directed the international art exhibitions for a gallery based in Beverly Hills, California.

She is a movement educator and studied dance since childhood. Authentic movement and “no fourth wall theatre” is the basis of her artistic practice. She creates solo and group performative works internationally that collaborate with the environment—be it the city or the natural world.  From the Edinburgh Fringe Festival to the edge of the Vatican City in Rome, from Berlin to Paris, the Angelbird, an enchanting, mythical figure, Elizabeth has offered a unique public engagement experience that begins with a specific performance and culminates with the invitation to “remember your wings” and metaphorically take flight.

These works explore the nature of human connection and disconnection, engaging the observer as a participant in equal measure. They provoke the spectrum of internal states, creating pockets of intimacy within the public sphere, to feel the emotional ecosystem we inhabit alongside our patterned life. This ecosystem becomes its own performative space to facilitate spiritual and practical insights into the micro- and the macrocosm.

The performative works engage story, tales and myth to reflect on our own nature within the invitation to participate and contribute as a equal creator and artist. Extinction and rebirth are themes. Love stories requisite.  

THE ANGELBIRD

The Angelbird is a mythical winged creature inspiring people to remember their dreams about flight and freedom. Through mesmerizing movement and spoken word, the Angelbird engages the audience in a tale compiled from her own migration, adding bits of science and symbolism from art history, ultimately encouraging the audience to engage the imagination and take flight. And they do. 

The experience is a highly entertaining, thought provoking, and deeply touching public performance ritual. Through the symbolism of taking flight, the Angelbird marries humankind’s mortality and divinity. The experience rekindles the imagination and catalyzes the power of the collective—to dream our highest hopes and aspirations into reality. 

As a public performance ritual, The Angelbird shows up on the streets from Los Angeles to Europe, from Croatia to Poland, from Germany to Italy, namely Berlin to Rome, distributing messages from a bird cage inviting people to remember their wings and to fly. 

The Angelbird was created by Elizabeth Yochim, a dancing art historian, who costumed as an all white-winged creature, performs amongst the piazzas and gardens, around museums and cathedrals, on trains and buses and within various congregations gently invading the spaces of our universal, communal psyche and infiltrating the pulse of the human spirit through the cadence of her artfully orchestrated wings. Asking the people that she meets, Do you remember your wings? & Will you fly with me?