Dance + Live Media

Walking After began as a contemplation on the futility of progress. I wondered where I would be if I had walked for my whole life. What if we could measure our lives in terms of linear distance? This contemplation on perpetual walking brought me Superstudio’s Supersurface, an imagined interconnected grid that expands across the earth.

As I continue to develop the work my focus has shifted to uncertainty and the desire for order. These past 2 years have been a case study in not-knowing. I realized that yearning for progress was, more fundamentally, a search for order and structure. I have been incorrectly waiting for some sort of return to “order” which not only will never come but also likely should not. In my body, this waiting manifests as a series of repetitive loops and lines. This drew me to line dances, not only because of their repetitive, perpetual walking structure, but also because they are predicated on the presence of a community–both in order to learn and execute the dance. I have found myself yearning for collective, communal, organized movement. 

I also fear this desire for order. I know it comes from an impulse to stifle rather than understand the chaos I feel inside and in the world around me. I want to use this new work to question this yearning, not only its dangers and benefits but also its effects on the body and the mind.

Choreography and Sound Design by Amanda Hameline, created in collaboration with performers Anna Hull and Jace Weyant

Teeth is about the collision of simultaneous realities and atmospheres – more specifically the relationship between the weightless yet revelatory power of light (rendered as ephemeral structures created by Shana Crawford) and the heavy, abstract movement of dancers in and outside of the lit space. 

I am thinking about the lens of visibility–what emerges into the foreground and background, and how movement at a periphery reveals itself through time and exposure to light.

My work as a whole is interested in the intersection of movement and environment. My choreography both takes inspiration from the natural environment and works directly in relationship with the environment created by audience members present in the performance space.  I work to bring movement that is of an external environment into conversation with the space it is happening inside of and people it is in front of. Contending with that environmental clasht, shaping it and being shaped by it is what my dancers are about – navigating the conditions of space and place.

Choreography by Jessie Young with Lighting Design by Shana Crawford and Sound Design by ALEXA

Performers: Bree Breeden, Justin Faircloth, Nina Guevara, Mia Martelli, Ariana Speight, and Meghann Trago