2 CHOREO DRAFTS: “Under the Sun” (trio) and “Mare” (solo)
For weeks, I observed and built up the developing phrases with the dancers … but I had no “idea” what the movement was supposed to mean, what it was meaning, or what it could mean.
But slowly, the developing phrases began to trigger things …
Under the Sun
They carry posture like a rumor. It slips.
A system assembles: hinge, tether, rupture, return.
No music—only breath, impact, the cost of movement.
One steps forward, becomes figure, dissolves.
Another follows. Then another. No one keeps the role.
Hands present. The offering refuses to arrive.
Mouths open—too much, or not enough.
Reason builds upward. The body spills outward.
Ritual frames it, briefly, and fails to hold.
Under the sun, nothing accumulates—only passes through.
The dance does not start; it is already underway.
Twenty-three minutes of:
spend / suspend / collapse / begin again.
They finish where they began,
with nothing left to add.
This is called full.
—
Created from instant dances (2021–2026)
First ensemble choreography (23 minutes)
Development continues with Bluebox Hub (Vienna)
Journey Residency, June 2026
Final draft: early 2027
Festival presentation: April 2027
Under the Sun began as an accumulation of fragments. In the studio, I asked the dancers to embody sequences drawn from my archive of instant dances—phrases built without predetermined meaning, assembled through intuition, repetition, and variation. The material grew quickly: unison, mirroring, interruption, layering. It continued to build without asking what it meant.
At one point, watching a recording, a phrase surfaced uninvited: meaningless, meaningless, meaningless. It was unsettling, but also strangely appropriate to the process. Shortly after, I encountered Ecclesiastes, where the same words appear—“all is vanity” under the sun. This coincidence reframed what I was seeing: not a lack of meaning, but a cycle of striving, expenditure, and return. Conversations and further reading brought in parallel notions—from Buddhist ideas of emptiness as fullness, to Bataille’s sense of life driven by excess energy that must be spent.
The piece began to clarify itself through these overlaps. Figures emerge, act, attempt, and dissolve. Gestures offer and withdraw. Effort accumulates without lasting result. What remains is not a conclusion, but a cycle: energy rising, being used, and falling away again.
Under the Sun holds these movements without resolving them—an image of bodies caught in patterns of action and exhaustion, where meaning appears briefly and then slips, leaving only the fact of having moved through it.
2.
Mare
A suit enters with a chair.
The chair is reasonable. The body is not.
Something kicks—slides—stops.
A sound appears that isn’t there.
Containment is attempted.
Containment fails politely, then abruptly.
A horse passes through the body.
Or the body remembers it was never only human.
Lips loosen. Hair becomes weather.
The room widens into something like a field, or a sea.
Start / stop / start again—
as if obstacles are being invented in real time.
The chair insists on order.
The body negotiates, then refuses.
A whinny breaks the surface.
No one answers.
Mare: animal, tide, disturbance, visitor in the night.
All of them, briefly, and not held.
The dance does not resolve.
It circles, resists, spills, returns.
—
First draft, danced by Holly Plett
From instant dance fragments (2021–2026)
Performed in silence
First draft, danced by Holly Plett
From instant dance fragments (2021–2026)
Performed in silence
Mare emerged in the shadow of Under the Sun. While building the trio, Holly Plett and I found ourselves moving quickly—phrases accumulating faster than they could be placed. There was an excess, a remainder, and within it, a solo began to take shape. We stayed with it, extending our studio time, allowing the material to gather and reorganize around Holly.
In an early run, something shifted. Watching the footage back, I heard a horse’s whinny where there had been none. The movement—its starts, its refusals, its sudden force—seemed to call for it. I asked Holly to give it voice, and from there the piece began to orient itself around a tension: between control and impulse, restraint and release, the human frame and something more animal passing through it.
The first draft runs approximately 11–13 minutes. It will continue to evolve during an upcoming residency at Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York in November 2026.
Like much of my solo practice, it draws on a minimal set of elements—chair, light, suit, live sound—forming a structure that can hold different bodies, different identities, while returning to the same underlying question: what moves, and what contains it.
