My new work, Finally, Fairies! premiered at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center’s Dance Theater at the University of Maryland, College Park on March 11, 2022. The work included Six performers who embodied our research on hauntology, choreographic spectrality, emptiness, Vaporwave, and ongoingness. We included archive footage, an original sound score by Skyler Nowinski and designed by Emily Pan, costumes by Channing Tucker, and a scenic landscape by Andrés Poch integrated with lighting by Heather Reynolds and media designs by Deja Collins.
All of the movement was primarily developed from a filmed improvisation, Solo 2009, which I created over a dozen years ago. The process revealed sensibilities old and new: the non-place, the still act, the revenant, gentle camp, psychological gesture, semiotic ambivalence, and frustrations of beauty and closure.
This process taught me how to expand a project that is of me, but not merely about me. As with any creative project, my collaborators and I now have more questions. Why Gentle Camp, and what does gentle, as a texture, adjective, filter, offer that camp doesn’t alone? How can Psychological Gesture, a Chekhov concept used in theatrical training, be re-purposed specifically for the dancer? How can improvisational scores that are developed primarily through solo research be deepened and expanded to suggest new ways of relating to a collective through nuanced articulations of sensing?
Cast: Emilia Bruno, Hana Huie, Christina Robson, Rebecca Steinberg, Carlo Antonio Villanueva, Tristan Koepke, Caroline Rocher Barnes (in video).
Photo Cred: Jonathon Hsu.
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