Speaking of duets, I’m excited that Erin Rehberg, an old dancing friend from my Chicago days, curated me to perform a redux of the silver duet from Attached as part of Connect the Dots at EMP Collective. I’ll be performing with a Baltimore dancer (to be announced!), to whom I will translate the score and essentially create a human specific piece (as opposed to site-specific). This duet will be very different depending on who is performing it.

I’ve also booked some exciting performances this summer. Stay tuned to the calendar for more information!

Since 2013 has begun, I’ve already been to the West Coast and back, performing at the stunning Amargosa Opera House in a piece created by Elise Long (and another showing of Desert People, appropriate for this setting).

I’m in the midst of developing new work, which I began while at Mount Tremper Arts Center in September for an Artward Bound residency. I’m studying food, race, immigration and native/non-native plants, all through the lens of performance. I’ve already shown excerpts of work created around this idea, first in a durational cooking performance in October of last year at The New School’s Art. Environment. ACTION! exhibit then as a choreographed movement section at Spoke the Hub in January. I will be collaborating with young people, gardens, dancers, anthropologists and farmers in the months to come as I develop different iterations of what I plan to be a long-term work.

I am also excited to be joining The Woods Cooperative as a member in February, allowing me to have a regular rehearsal studio (which I haven’t had since I was in residence at CAVE).

I’ll be performing my creations around New York, the West Coast and hopefully elsewhere this year as well as performing the work of some other choreographers. Stay tuned to this blog and my new Calendar page for more details.

Based on Erwin Wurm’s Confessional performance installations. A collaboration with Alex Vessels. More here.

created while in residence at Starry Night Artist Retreat, performed at Estrella Gallery

Home is a duet performed with Susan Melinda Dunlap, music by Joshua Frankel. A structured improvisation between dance and music, based on ideas about home, attachment and family.

Saturday, May 5
Studio A.I.R.
Doors at 8pm, performance at 8:30 p.m.
To keep the series running, we ask for suggested donation of $5 and/or bring food or drink to the reception.

67 Metropolitan, 4th Floor, (between Wythe and Kent)
Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
L train to Bedford Avenue

January 14: Gowanus Art Fair
The Lowbrow Society has curated Desert People as part of its video art programming. This will be its second showing in the world! The Gowanus Art Fair looks to be a cross section of Brooklyn art, with everything from visual art to one-act plays getting represented at the Gowanus Ballroom.

February 3&4: I’ve been independently curating a show titled Object as Performer, which brings together a variety of dance, performance, video and installation artists whose work centers around elevating inanimate objects beyond the role of a simple prop. The show will feature work by Rebecca Davis, Abigail Levine, Juri Onuki, Nina Schwanse, Felisia Tandiono and the A.O. Movement Collective. It will also be accompanied by a book of essays and photos on the subject of the object as a performer. This book is currently available on Kickstarter. Please consider a donation at any level to help make this show happen. Visit the campaign by clicking here.
The show is taking place at CPR-Center for Performance Research at 8 p.m. both evenings.

February 4: At the very same time, I’m coordinating Pentacle Movement Media’s monthly Kinetic Cinema series. This month we’re featuring shorts that were submitted to but not selected for the Dance Films Association’s annual Dance on Camera Festival. We’re calling it the Dance on Camera Extended Program, and it should be a really great time.
Join us at 7 p.m. at the Center for Remembering and Sharing in Manhattan.

February 17-20: chaNorth, the artist residency I coordinate, will be having an alumni show at a chashama gallery space in Harlem. Artists who were in residence in 2011 will be showing work of many disciplines, including photography, painting, installation, music and dance. The gallery will be open for viewing all three days, and there will be a special viewing party with performances and an art auction on the evening of February 18. I will be showing video performance work I created in June, during my first month in the Hudson Valley.
Location: chashama gallery at 461 W. 126th St. in Manhattan. Stay tuned for more details.

Debut: May 1, 2011
CPR-Center for Performance Research, Brooklyn, NY
Performers: Meredith Blouin, Sarah Dahnke, Jen Kovacs, Michelle Micca, Stacy Smith, Karilyn Surratt

Attached is a performance installation with three duets and three videos, set to a chorus of screams. The audience is invited to explore the contrasting natures of three symbiotic relationships that occur around the space, like kinetic sculptures.

(August, 2010: grid section workshopped at EMPAC in Troy, NY)

A joint collaboration between Drew Burrows, Sarah Dahnke and Sarah Holmes.

Glitch is a multimedia dance performance, utilizing interactive projections to create a transformative environment of rigid boundaries contrasted with fluid imagery.

a work in progress. coming soon.

Wafaa Bilal says he creates performances and projects that engage an audience while bringing two zones together. (In his case, he speaks of Iraq, his home country and the United States, where he now resides.) He says he uses “the body as a bridge.”

In my residency at Starry Night Retreat in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, I’m working on projects that centralize around the transient nature of home, what defines a home and migration. I pondered on this quote of Wafaa’s that I had jotted in a notebook after hearing an artist talk with him at NYU when I was a graduate student and came up with some questions of my own, such as: How long can you use the body as a bridge before it falls down? What do we bridge? (Possible answers: two areas of land, two bodies of water, two structures, two countries, two people, communication.) And lastly, Why do we bridge? My answer to this was simply, to avoid isolation.