FIREWALLS

1-minute Teaser

Excerpt: Wall Duet

Full-length

“a stunning piece of architecture” – Cecly Placenti, Critical Dance (full review here)

Firewalls examines our societal urge to put up barriers, control access to information, and limit the passage of peoples. In computing, a firewall is a network security system that establishes a barrier between a trusted secure internal network and another network that is assumed to not be secure and to not be trusted. In this piece, the society operates and functions on or close to the wall with the floor assuming the role of the vast untrusted unknown. The performers dance on the wall as if magnetically attracted to it, incorporating acrobatics, breakdancing, contact-improv-based partnering, and weight-sharing into a movement vocabulary that would be impossible without it.

The original work-in-progress, called The Asymptote to Zero Gravity, was performed at Studio 469 (DC) and was created in collaboration with Josh Alverson, Margaret Allen, Kathy Gordon, Katie Murphy, Elizabeth Odell, and Katie Vaught. A second version was performed at the Center for Performance Research (NYC) and was created in collaboration with Jordan Aragon, Anna Brown Massey, Alyssa Caliendo, Neva Cockrell, Ariel Isakowitz, Jun Lee, Elizabeth McGuire, Shawn Rawls, and Owen Taylor. This last version, shown here, was performed by Tabytha Bates, Micheline Heal, Elizabeth McGuire, Samantha Sterman, and Owen Taylor as a part of the Under Exposed series at Dixon Place.

PHOTOS