Photos by David Rauch
softshell
5 dancers ; 40 minutes
Music: Mitski, Michael Wall, Daniel Johnston
The impetus for softshell was built out of the acknowledgment, and acceptance, of the aging dancing body. In particular, navigating a “post”-pandemic world has created a strange space where deferred dreaming permeates beneath a simmering surface. softshell takes that notion and filters it through the lens of embodied trauma. Sliding the liminal space between joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, the work is a quiet, queer experiment that seeks no solution. Dancers cohabitate a universal, yet individualized landscape of symbiotically shared movement language where by design, no intentional crescendos can be found. Instead, the dance asks the viewer to slow down alongside it, embracing its current stasis of intimacy, and preparing for the inevitable mess that has yet to materialize.
“But what happens if joy is not separate from pain? What if joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up in one another? Or even more to the point, what if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things? What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from hearback, is what effloresces from us all as we help each other carry our heartbreak?”
- Ross Gay, Inciting Joy
Performance History:
Monira Foundation Residency // Jersey City, NJ // April 2023
Morven Museum & Garden // Princeton, NJ // May 2023
Dance Local Residency // Bernardsville, NJ // August 2023
Monira Foundation // Jersey City, NJ // October, 2023
Take Root at Green Space // Queens, NY // March, 2023 (Premiere)
Original Cast: Tori Breen, Grant Jacoby, Sarah Liebau, Arielle Ridley, and Anne Tantuico
This work was made possible thanks to residencies at the Monira Foundation at Mana Contemporary and Dance Local, as well as support from Center for Dance Arts in Farmingdale, NJ and Morven Museum & Garden.
Music: Mitski, Michael Wall, Daniel Johnston
The impetus for softshell was built out of the acknowledgment, and acceptance, of the aging dancing body. In particular, navigating a “post”-pandemic world has created a strange space where deferred dreaming permeates beneath a simmering surface. softshell takes that notion and filters it through the lens of embodied trauma. Sliding the liminal space between joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, the work is a quiet, queer experiment that seeks no solution. Dancers cohabitate a universal, yet individualized landscape of symbiotically shared movement language where by design, no intentional crescendos can be found. Instead, the dance asks the viewer to slow down alongside it, embracing its current stasis of intimacy, and preparing for the inevitable mess that has yet to materialize.
“But what happens if joy is not separate from pain? What if joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up in one another? Or even more to the point, what if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things? What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from hearback, is what effloresces from us all as we help each other carry our heartbreak?”
- Ross Gay, Inciting Joy
Performance History:
Monira Foundation Residency // Jersey City, NJ // April 2023
Morven Museum & Garden // Princeton, NJ // May 2023
Dance Local Residency // Bernardsville, NJ // August 2023
Monira Foundation // Jersey City, NJ // October, 2023
Take Root at Green Space // Queens, NY // March, 2023 (Premiere)
Original Cast: Tori Breen, Grant Jacoby, Sarah Liebau, Arielle Ridley, and Anne Tantuico
This work was made possible thanks to residencies at the Monira Foundation at Mana Contemporary and Dance Local, as well as support from Center for Dance Arts in Farmingdale, NJ and Morven Museum & Garden.
