KINDREDS: a song about animals
Performance, 2014/2016
Danspace, NYC
12 minutes
Documentation of “KINDREDS” in collaboration with Letitia Spangler. The work celebrated ‘play’ and emotional wisdom while pushing deeper into concepts of intimacy and co-dependency. We spent rehearsals “playing animal” and sought out behaviors that are present in both humans and animals. We started building animal vocabulary that joined different animals into one form and/or uncanny derivatives of existing animals. Without formal dance training, she and I wanted the body language to be legible as familiar.
"KINDREDS” was a structuralist project beginning with texts given to me by friends and mentors. The common threads throughout were: emotional reactivity, hungry animals, truth and repetition. During the cold winter months, Letitia Spangler and I made a dance that is both a playful veneration of animals and a full-on embodiment of animal behaviors and relationships. It is an ancient performance-in-progress that brings together notions of daily routine and attachment while expressing the impossibilities of longing.