Privy (2009) – 30 minutes
The point of this dance is to share. Artists are always having an experience on stage that the audience members watch, and then walks away from when the performance is finished. I want to change the role of the audience from passive spectator to active participant. There are many exercises attempted in the work: purposeful induced confusion using verbal cues, actual movement participation, story telling as a device for practiced imagination in the work. The piece is an experiment in speaking clearly, exhausting oneself, and in the end hopefully not just showing an experience but sharing it instead.
Trigger (2008) – 33 minutes
This work is very political in thought and therefore slightly aggressive in physical nature. The two themes driving the piece are consumerism and war – specifically how consumerism and its deadly environmental effects directly funds war. The five performers lure the audience into their world while dancing around in costumes made completely of recycled materials. As 12,000 used restaurant guest checks fall from above onto the viewers and into the space, the dancers explore ideas concerning: the uselessness of wasted materials; loss due to violence; how a fight starts and then turns into bloodshed; and personal reactions when being forced to defend themselves. At one point the audience is asked to make paper airplanes and use them as weapons towards the dancers. The piece takes a close look at one small part of the huge concept of war and tries to answer how we as artists fit into the grand scheme of it all.
Makeshift (2008) – 13 minutes
A new work created with the intent of using the audience reactions as fodder for live conversational movement. The soundscore is a live text, pre-recorded, of the choreographer’s (my) voice. I also dances in the piece, which provides a sort of tension when the audience realizes that the dancer is having a dialogue with himself. This fashioned comfort zone gives the dancers and the script the freedom to touch on some more awkward / taboo subject matters very literally: failing economic standards, failing environmental standards, world hunger, guilt, etc. The performers dance in clothing ranging from the neutrality of solid colored mechanics suits to the sophisticated detail of a flapper dress made entirely of metrocards (200 to be exact).
Ladies who lunch (2007) – 7 minutes
A piece based off of two main ideas: make movement so non-stop physically demanding that the audience has to feel with/for the dancers, and to rebel against the artificiality of pre-recorded music as the only complement for live dance. The crux of the piece happens by inducing a relationship with the audience created by a verbal, conversational soundscore that serves as the music for the dancers. As the conversation goes along (spoken by myself and a personal assistant), the dancers perform phrase work that was built from the real flailing actions of a full onset asthma attack. The two very different points of view, calming dialogue in relation to chaotic movement, are juxtaposed in order to have the audience participate with the performers instead of just watching them. Also, the dancers are dressed in hand-made costumes from completely recycled and/or re-used materials: restaurant guest checks, old dance post card and expired metro cards.
yes, this hurts (2007) – 23 minutes
During my second year in NYC, I went blind for two weeks due to some water that had gotten into my eye. The experience was incredibly painful. I was left with no choices. Whether I closed, opened or left my eyes alone, they would get scratched and bleed. I wanted to reproduce the feeling of being left with no choices for myself through movement. The first section of the dance deals with a body left to someone else’s control. The next part deals with the actual movement that happens when I was in pain. The last section deals with playing games – through the games, each of the dancers has to deal with having control taken away and then being controlled. Throughout the piece, the main point is to have a relationship with the audience. In my work I want to continually invite the audience to live in the dance with me, not just watch it.
mmburshlamfphan [Foot in mouth] (2007) – 10 minutes
I chose quotes from a variety of figureheads in different types of entertaining medias such as movie actors, politicians, etc. For each quote I made a movement phrase and for each phrase I put a corresponding shoe in my mouth while I danced. (There was a lot spitting, gagging and near vomiting.) This was all done in order to actually feel what it would be like to have my foot in my mouth. The bigger the blunder of a quote (for example, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger saying “Gay marriage should be kept between a man and a woman”), the bigger the shoe I put in my mouth. This piece is about living in true awkwardness, and then finding a way to live in the moments after.
She Loves Me… (2008) 6 minutes
A humorous work based on the image of a girl picking flower petals and lamenting “He loves me, he loves me not…” The gender roles are reversed for the flower-picker, and the three dancers take on the role of the flower – daisy, rose and daffodil. The work begins with a “dramatic” interaction between the lovelorn and the daisy and then the female flowers take over.
Caged Birds (2005) 13 minutes
A dance for the camera assignment. The limitations were to make all the choreography on the spot (no pre-determined choreography), and to shoot all the footage in one day. The work was performed at the Siebel Center in Illinois – a brand new glass encased research lab for studies in the arts and sciences. The crux of the building is a glass floor suspended between the third and fourth floors, where most of the footage for the piece was taken.