About This Show

An evening of dance with Sean Thomas Boyt, Claudia Coonan & Stephanie Kleman, Syd Franz & Aviya Hernstadt, Kashia Klancey, and Rodney Murray

Untitled – Sean Thomas Boyt
Seanshuuraku EXP situates the stage and live performance as opportunities for self-expression and transformation. Specifically, this dance proposes a means for the titular Sean to imagine and build an environment where bodily agency, presentation, and safety are all possible and probable. Can this dance be the final occasion where they use the theater and the edge of the proscenium to take refuge from the outside world? Using improvisational scores, task-based choreography, and interpretive movement as experiments, these devices prescribe limitations that alter their performance: the successes and failures in each iteration are made visible to the performer and viewers alike.

Beautiful Feeling – Claudia Coonan & Stephanie Kleman
This improvisational duet was developed through a common love of collaboration, improvisation, and active self-discovery. Each time this work is performed, it offers a glimpse at / snapshot of the artists’ active exploration of themselves, their identity, how they interact with their environment, and how they navigate their relationship with each other. Keywords that help guide and inform these explorations include groove, shared energies, spatial awareness, queer joy, sexuality & sensuality, wildness, and athleticism.

Thunderbird – Syd Franz & Aviya Hernstadt
We’re playing with a mashup of physical performing mediums alongside Thelma, Louise, and Cher to explore the freedom that comes from the ends (and beginnings) of relationships and the transformative capacity of release. What if instead of life after love, there is love after life? What if taking the risk to leave what’s known pays off and gives us the queer fantasy we all deserve?

I Believed It Too – Kashia Kancey
I Believed It Too asks “When the curtain closes, who are you?”. This work explores trauma, happiness, solace and exhaustion. I am investigating the idea of the mask we all wear. In this journey we begin to see the facade of the soloist fade. She is no longer able to maintain her mask and the secure illusion she has outwardly portrayed. Her perception of reality becomes distorted, putting into question the efficacy of her guise.

ACT THREE – Rodney Murray
I light a candle in an altar but forget your name as it fades [……] An elegy on memory, a door slammed shut, a sunset utterance [……] A dénouement, an attempted resolution, an unwritten stage direction [……] A tender submission to the languages and images of the contemporary [……] ACT THREE is an encounter between the 21st-century body and the languages by which it is written.