Reversed Thunder
Hired in 2019 to make a collaborative performance event for Dimnent Chapel around the Book of Revelation. Live performance elements included organ music, three dancers, three text performers, natural light through stained glass, and the progression of the audience through the space in relation to these things.
Notes on the choreography (as published in the program for the event, July 2019) ---
My initial response to the thought of choreographing to contemporary organ music, about Revelation, in Dimnent Chapel was that anything that the dancers or I could come up with would feel small, trite, and labored. Dimnent Chapel is too large. Revelation is too large. Eventually, it dawned on me that the most effective treatment of the content within the context of the space, would be to include an emphasis on the performance of the building itself, and offer an opportunity to experience the chapel’s cavernous, empty, vertical space. The dance was made for Dimnent Chapel, to Langlais’s haunting meditations on Revelation. And it was made for you to see it from the places where you have been choreographed to be. As your visual perspective is shifted from one location to another, you will see the building itself become part of the performance. I hope that you might consider your entire experience tonight as a meditation on Revelation; not simply the work that you see and hear, but also your very perception of the events in the space. Notice the ways that your perspective is not only changed because of varying distances, but also by details like the sources of sound, and your perception of the dancers’ movements in relation to the space itself. The dance does not tell a story. There is nothing in the choreography to “get” or “not get.” There is a only an experience of Revelation to be seen, heard, and felt.