Teeth [2022]
Through Teeth I am investigating questions of artistic self-sufficiency and interdependence. Together as a cast this artistic community is constructing a sort of “group thought” – a shared approach to how we come together and who we are when we come together.
The performers of Teeth construct the landscape that they are moving inside of. They simultaneously navigate channels of movement together and also create those channels. The lighting for the work is being developed by Shana Crawford, and interwoven in the movement is also the navigation of lighting structures that open and collapse the geography of the space. The sound landscape is being devised and performed live by ALEXA GRAE. The movement explores undulations, body waves and different scales of those movements. I am inspired by the image of a river delta and specifically the dam removal at the Elwha River in Port Angeles Washington (my hometown). Over ten years I have watched the coastline and mouth of the Elwha shift and change alongside this removal. These changes remind me of a group–how just bringing a group of people together in a room creates infinitely more possibilities than my solitary mind can imagine.
The work moves inside of a question - what becomes possible when we dance/move together? What does the movement study of a body wave look like when dispersed amongst 6+ performers? How can light interact with movement in a way that creates shifting landscapes? It would be fitting to think of this work as an emergence of group thought. My role inside of all this is to listen, to facilitate and direct the overall trajectory and development of the work. But it is necessarily being made by us all.
Collaborators
Dancers
Bree Breeden is a performance artist. She was born in Cheraw, SC, raised in NJ and now resides in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated from Montclair State University and is currently the managing director and artist with Proteo Media + Performance and is a dance artist with Michiyaya Dance, Von Howard Project and Kyle Marshall Choreography. Bree works primarily in collaboration with project based artists which includes Jessie Young, Janessa Clark, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd and more. Outside of performance Bree enjoys filming, baking and exploring new landscapes.
Justin Faircloth is a performing artist from North Carolina. Since moving to New York, Justin has had the pleasure of working with Blaze Ferrer, Cherylyn Lavagnino, Doug LeCours, loveconductors (FOH), Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener, Maddie Schimmel, Then She Fell, Third Class Citizen, Erik Thurmond, Ash Yergens, Jessie Young, Abby Zbikowski, and others. Insta: @bacnneggs
Nina Guevara is a dancer and self-taught visual artist born and raised in San Francisco, California; currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Nina graduated from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University with a Dance BFA in the spring of 2020. At Mason Gross, she had the privilege of working with Darrell Grand Moultrie, Pam Tanowitz, Chien Ying Wang, Shannon Gillen, Jessie Young, Ani Javian and others. In October 2021, Nina performed in Untitled Mood Lighting by Isaac Pool as a part of PRELUDE Festival 2021 at Wave Hill. She has been working with Jessie Young since the spring of 2021.
Mia Martelli is a multimedia performance artist. She explores how environments are built through live performance, and how stories are told using cultural ephemera. Mia was a 2021 LiftOff Artist-in-Residence for New Dance Alliance and a Visual Muze Governor’s Island Artist-in-Residence through the West Harlem Art Fund. Her most recent solo, Girly-Sound, will be presented by MAGMA (Gloucester, MA) and New Dance Alliance.
Mia’s dances and process have been supported by AUNTS, Queer Spectra Arts Festival (Salt Lake City, UT), and The School for Contemporary Dance and Thought (Northampton, MA). Her videos and visual art have been published by Queerly Contemporary Festival, GRRL Haus Cinema (Berlin), and various independent zines and publications. She collaborates as a performer for Chloe London, Jessie Young, and Jordan Demetrius Lloyd.
Ariana Speight (she/her/hers), a graduate of Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University with a BFA in Dance and a minor in Africana Studies, is a contemporary dance artist invested in researching the curiosities of life through various mediums. Originally from Los Angeles, she had the opportunity to dance abroad at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance where she studied Gaga technique and repertory from Batsheva company members and Vertigo Dance Company. Currently based in Brooklyn, she has performed with a number of artists, most recently including Joanna Kotze, Jordan Lloyd, Kyle Marshall, and Jessie Young. She is also certified as a Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT) under Om Factory School of Yoga/Yoga Alliance and Pilates instructor where she continues to nurture + grow her teaching practice.
Meghann Trago is a freelance dance artist. She graduated from Bard College - while there, she had the privilege to perform works by Souleymane Badolo, Michelle Ellsworth, Trisha Brown, and Marjani Forté-Saunders. She is based in New York and has worked with Abby Zbikowski and Jessie Young.
Sound
ALEXA GRÆ's work is a combination of artistic disciplines informed by specialized academic training in music composition and opera. Rigorous training as an opera student challenged them to transcend the boundaries of various art forms and to understand cultural boundaries of art in the everyday world. They bridge these chasms by focusing on how art informs identities, socialization habits, self-expression, and the ability to create, creating genre-defying performances that incorporate multiple dance styles, theatrical personas, and experimental storytelling styles. Themes of deconstructing classical forms, beliefs about the feminine and masculine, and channeling greater collective consciousness find an evolving presence in ALEXA GRÆ's work. Their mission is to identify moments of pure imagination and innocent creation, harnessing the immediate kinship it creates in order to draw us all toward something divine, something as yet to be defined.
Lighting
Shana Crawford entangles herself in dance and performance across New York City as a dance artist, lighting designer, production manager and educator. Her work in all forms create structures for acts of togetherness and celebration. She collaborates with Jessie Young, Juliana May, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Laurie Berg, Madeline Best, Stephanie Acosta, and Yanan Yu, among others. She has worked with Body Cartography, danceBARN and Hyp-ACCESS, and was a guest teaching artist with Young Dance’s 20-21 season. She is one of the co-organizers with AUNTS, a roving platform for dance, ran two years of the River to River Festival with LMCC and continues to produce events alongside her role as TD at the Chocolate Factory Theater. Her visual work has been presented with Melanie Maar’s line death dance newsletter, at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and with ANTE mag’s Home Room group shows. Shana teaches dance, creative movement, improvisation and choreography, and studied alt. pedagogies in mathematics at BSME in Budapest, Hu. Shana has a degree in dance and mathematics from Bennington College and is getting her MS in Public Education at the Bank Street School. Shana orchestrates the Sometimes Together group and her work has been shared in NYC, MN, VT, HA, PA, MA, Italy and Spain.
Collaborators
Stephanie Acosta (Project Advisor) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and curator who places the materiality of the ephemeral at the center of her practice, questioning meaning-making and manufactured limitations. Blending performance with practice-based and studio research Acosta has presented her works with and for Museum of Art and Design, Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago, Chocolate Factory Theatre, Knockdown Center, the Current Sessions, Miami Performance International Festival, IN>Time Symposium, Abrons Arts Center, the Chicago Park District, the Performance Philosophy conference, AUNTS, Read/Write Library, and No Media.
Acosta has collaborated with artist Miguel Gutierrez, on multiple projects as dramaturg and collaborator including Cela nous concerne tous (This concerns all of us) for the Ballet de Lorraine in Nancy, France, and This Bridge Called My Ass which premiered 2019 American Realness before touring internationally. The collaborative curatorial experiment Sunday Service ran live for 6 seasons created with Alexis Wilkinson. Recently Acosta presented their multi-platform work Good Day God Damn at the Chocolate Factory Theatre LIC, NY, as solo exhibition curated by Alexis Wilkinson in May 2021 accompanied by a mini-series talk show titled Apocalypse Talks, speaking with artists on themes of multi-crisis making and radical hope found in art practices. She will be curating new programs at The Field Center around performance ecologies in Fall of 2022.
Iris McCloughan (Dramaturg) is a trans artist, writer, and performance maker in Brooklyn. Their performance work has been presented by Movement Research, Ars Nova, The Poetry Project, JACK, Philadelphia Contemporary, ICA Philadelphia, and many others. Since 2014 they have collaborated with Eiko Otake as a dramaturg and performer. Iris is the author of three chapbooks of poems, most recently Bones to Peaches (2021, Seven Kitchens Press) and Triptych (2021, greying ghost). They were the winner of the 2018 Stanley Kunitz Prize from American Poetry Review and were named a finalist in Nonfiction for Best of the New 2020. Their writing has appeared in jubilat, juked, Gertrude, Queen Mob's Teahouse, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere.
