PREMIERE DATE     2/26/2011 PREMIERE LOCATION     Southside Theater, San Francisco Ellis Wood’s newest work, MOM, is an evening-length solo with a diverse mix of music, multi-media and forty-five years of life as a female woven in. The solo explores issues ranging from realization and sense of worth to blankets and labor pains. In MOM, Wood juxtaposes music, video and dance embodying a deeply felt experience that relates in some way to every woman – and man. After years of creating group work on her company, Ellis Wood Dance, Wood has gone back to her roots for this particular project. In 1995, she started her choreographic career with a solo, Canary, which depicted a woman that metaphorically was put into a coalmine, as canaries were, to see if there were any gas leaks. If the canary died, there was a leak, if not, it came out alive. Fifteen years later, Wood has taken the plunge deeper into the mine and come out alive. With a history of creating work about and in support of women and a commitment to empowering women through movement, Wood’s solo MOM is a continuation of the tradition. Raw, revealing, vulnerable and at the same time triumphant, Wood experiences a myriad of emotions as she journeys through stages of a woman’s life. Weddings, funerals, births and sweatshirts are all impetus that springboard Wood down a path of no return and into a state of undeniable realization of what it is to be a mom.