Horse Dance
Horse Dance was created a University of Illinois Urbana Champaign originally performed as a solo by Gabriel Gonzalez then adapted to a duet for Anna Brady and Lena Rose with live Harmonica by Marlee Doniff.
Horse Dance was again Performed in New York City at Movement Research's Open Performance Lottery with discussion moderation by Tess Dworman.
Videos for both of these can be found below.
The piece builds off of working with Deke Weaver and Jennifer Allen's Unreliable Bestiary project. Weaver, who is a professor at UIUC, invited me to join the process after being his student in his performance art course. His process felt earnest and full of play, the rules for the movement were based in research; ranging from animal mating behavior, hunting strategies, fairy tale descriptions, native mythologies, and improvisational scores. Allen, who choreographed most of the movement, worked around Weaver's script to create scenes that created different tones for the performance-world. What I learned most from this process, was how to commit to performance, how to say 'well, this is the part where the giant cardboard boats come out and Ahab does an Opera and the 50 foot projection screens blast this footage of the sea from 5,000 dollar projectors with a lighting designer who has worked on the Olympics to the score of a famous dance musician.' It is just, well it's ridiculous in scale! It feels like it takes a certain mania to make happen, a certain resolve / madness / animal brain.
Horse Dance with Lena and Anna and Marlee in Illinois, USA
In this work, I'm focusing on the movement and aligning it to this Ethel Cain song that I stripped her vocals from using the app Moises. I made this dance as a farewell to graduate school, to the midwest, to free studio space, and because the year of the horse is fast approaching. I also felt so burnt out from explaining art and wanted to make something straightforward. Jacob Henss and Betsy Brandt once said in their dance, Cloven, "this is a piece about cows" which really gives a permission for the dance to dive deep into anything it needs, with the cow or in my case the horse, being a grounding theme for both audience and performer. Somewhere to return to, something to glean from watching, something everyone can to talk about in the slightly dreaded post show lobby conversation.
I've attempted to include an instagram highlight reel with some of the movement in this dances various iterations.^
I will also screen record the story and put it at the bottom of this if this link doesn't work.
The Solo was part of a longer work which you can watch on this link^
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