dancemaking
Natalie Fiol Photography
works
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| | \ (“three”) is a quartet that emerged from a question about feral joy: what is it, and how do we truly allow ourselves to experience it? This process slowly evolved into a practice of doing less and surrendering to passionate flow. | | \ grows into a collaborative reflection of joy, transforming tension to flow, while reckoning with cyclical patterns of uncertainty. It is a reflection and celebration of us being together in this short, transitional chapter of our lives.
| | \ was supported by the North Carolina Artist-in-Residence program, 2023-24 season.
Created in collaboration with dancers:
Savannah Jenkins, Leondria McCrae, Aislinn Travis
Premiering March 14-15, 2024 at Hamlin Park Fieldhouse, Chicago, IL
Tickets available here.
S W E L L
As a dance-work, S W E L L blends together personal memories and experiences related to themes of home, place, and belonging, while enmeshed with feelings of anticipatory grief. S W E L L explores and embodies moments of delay, deconstruction, and transition as opportunities for reflection, rest, and recalibration. As a process, S W E L L has organically become a container for healing: to honestly hold space for myself, and to reflect, process, and move through deeply embodied notions of “home” - both temporally and geographically.
S W E L L was created through the North Carolina Artist-in-Residence program, 2023-24 season.
Premiered November 2023 at Greensboro Project Space, Greensboro, NC
Call Me When You Get There.
I believe dance-making and dance performance serve as a transformative experience.
My movement language is largely informed by somatic practices, postmodern dance, and transmodern dance techniques.
Through movement, I explore virtuosity by blending physically rigorous, sensitive, and risk-taking movement patterns with intentional, functional performance tasks. My practice applies elements of somatic movement and improvisational experimentation as a method for expressing an individual experience. My choreographic research seeks to deconstruct traditional notions of dance presentation where concert dance and interdisciplinary performance can dynamically coexist.
My process experiments with movement vignettes, duration through repetition, and improvisational structures. I explore imagery, energy, and embedded emotion as materiality, and I apply these textures into set movement scores to magnify a more visceral, felt experience. I utilize these methods as entry points into finding more complex and intentional movement experiences. I aim to dissect my current knowledge of contemporary dance to further understand how its history and tradition is held in my body, and to discover how movement and dance presentation can serve as a larger metaphor for collective healing.
Establishing trust, empathy, and vulnerability through collaboration and performance inspires ways to reimagine tradition and create a shared, experiential environment for performer and viewer. These systems and practices within my creative process offers guidance for me to cross boundaries, take risks, and discover new meanings about healing, the purpose of dance, and the realities of human phenomena on a more embodied level. Cultivating spaces that are reflective of a functioning and equitable democratic society, inclusive of collective participation, and which foster social transformation, is of utmost importance to my work.
Movement allows me to communicate in ways that words do not.
Photo by Snovian Image
“Call Me When You Get There.” is an experiential performance that embodies themes of vulnerability, trust, empathy, and boundaries. This work dynamically blends contemporary dance, social practice, and interdisciplinary collaboration to engage with and depict the fleeting, yet ongoing, moments of our individual healing processes. “Call Me When You Get There.” invites the performer and viewer to look inward while finding ways to observe, listen, and connect with their surrounding environment.
Choreographed by kt williams + dancers
Music/sound composition by Del Ward
Performed by Asha Chinfloo, Anna Clymer, Anna Creekmore, Savannah Jenkins, Nya Smith, Aislinn Travis
Scenic design by Hunter Evans, Christopher Fleming, + kt williams
Lighting design by Savannah Jenkins, Christopher Fleming, + kt williams Videography + Editing by Chris Snow/Snovian Image
MFA Thesis Project, premiered March 23-24, 2023
University of North Carolina at Greensboro, School of Dance