My choreographic work is rooted in the body's interconnectedness with gravity and the environment and its capacity for physical and symbolic transformation. I often work with large groups of performers to explore networks of cooperation and resistance and gesture as both a physical material and a language for devising narrative.
My process is collaborative, rigorous, and interdisciplinary. My work is always devised in collaboration with the performers, and we begin each process with dedicated space for trail and error and discovery. Though the work is very physical, we strip away traditional dance training modalities to explore the body's materiality in relation to gravity and other external forces. I have a research-based process and often derive and manipulate movement and prompts from dance history, social rituals and games, online subcultures, pop culture, and other aspects of our historical and contemporary moment.
Four Girl Trick (performance piece, 16 minutes, 2019)
In Four Girl Trick, the choreography was derived from the internet girlhood game circulating on young women’s YouTube channels, Four Girl Chair Trick. The choreographic systems are based on the instructions the young women give one another in the videos – sometimes challenging one another and other times resisting the challenges proposed by their friends. My appropriation of this game uses the instructions to create a networked object out of the women’s simultaneous cooperation and resistance to a system. The work reveals the materiality of the game as a networked interdependency of women both supporting and restricting one another, not just physically, but aesthetically and politically as well. I put the game up on pedestals to speak to the fetishization of the young women’s bodies, considering these women’s production of images for YouTube and the hundreds of thousands of views on their YouTube pages.
Exhibited:
LA Dance Project at Francois Ghebaly Gallery 2019
California Institute of the Arts Gallery C113 2019
La Mama Moves at La Mama Galleria 2019
CalArts cast: Kristen DeLillo, Stacy Collado, Bailey Anglin, Morgaine DeLeonardis, Elyse Desmond, Arantxa Araujo, Molly Gorin, Lir Katz
LA Dance Project cast: Julienne Mackey, Sam Blaz, Kait McKinney, Kayla Aguila, Camila Arana, Taylor Unwin, Cacia LaCount, Chenui Mao
Study for Les Noces (performance piece, 25 minutes, 2019)
Comissioned by LA Dance Project 2019
An adaptation of the Ballet Russes Les Noces by Igor Stravinsky, choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska. The original Les Noces is composed of melancholic rituals to prepare for a wedding, with the scenes split between women and the bride and men and the bridegroom. My adaptation draws from Nijinska’s tableaus, and the performers sustain the formations until they eventually must tire and disintegrate. The work echoes Nijinskas orginal intention to present the preparation for a wedding as a traumatic rite of passage in which young women experience the pain of leaving female friendships. I merged Nijinska’s choreography with contemporary and Medeival girlhood games and text from Les Noces and Margarita Karapanou’s coming of age story, Kassandra and the Wolf.
Performed by Luciana Johnson, Gigi Todisco, Marissa Mooney, Lucinda Trask, Colleen Hendricks, Taylor Unwin, Vanessa Holyoak, Sam Blaz, Cacia LaCount, Chenui Mao, Kait McKinney, Kayla Aguila, Julienne Mackey, Kathryn Sauma, Jennifer Lacy, Lucy Kerr, and Sara Suarez
So Resistant An Object (performance installation, 2018)
So Resistant An Object explores the body’s relationship to gravity as political resistance. The performers continue to roll down the stairs of City Hall in Wilmington, NC, collecting dust on their bodies, resisting upright conditioning of the body, and investigating the body’s vibrant matter horizontally.
Performances:
CalArts School of Art Open Studios 2019
Cucalorus Festival 2018
INSITU Site-Specific Festival 2017
concept, direction/organization by Lucy Kerr
choreography by Lucy Kerr and the performers
performers: Rina Espiritu, Elyse Desmond, Stacy Collado, Kristen DeLillo, Lir Katz, Mackenzie Taylor
Landscape Study (2016, performance piece, 16 minutes)
Studies in the movement of a landscape
presented as part of Spring Movement 2017 at The Center for Performance Research
choreography by Lucy Kerr in collaboration with the performers
Performed by Zach Khoo, Elyse Desmond Arantxa Araujo, Kenny Frechette, Kristen DeLIllo, Ann-Mario Gover, Lir Katz, Rina Espiritu, Jiemin Yang, Mecca Allah, Stacy Collado, Mario Galeano, Mckenzie Chen, and Elizabeth Cowperthwaite
understudies and rehearsal assistants: Mackenzie Taylor and Molly Gorin
lighting design by Mike Faba