Performance Works (Selected)
Weathering (2023) With dramaturgy and writing by Dages Juvelier Keates, Faye Driscoll’s newest work is a multi-sensory flesh sculpture made of bodies, sounds, scents, liquids and objects. Ten people (dancers/singers/crew) enact a glacially morphing tableau vivant on a mobile raft-like stage surging through the Anthropocene. Their voices generate a score that crescendos and resonates as they clutch, careen and cleave, in a space too small to contain them, spilling off the edges. The audience embanks the performers, close enough to smell the sweat and feel the steam of the central, spiralling scenes. The symphonically active, luminously living work is a breathing, leaking, choreography of micro events within a momentum thrusting from just beyond the perceivable. Reviewed for the NY Times by Siobhan Burke, and performed at New York Live Arts, NYC.
Calving (2022) Transdisciplinary artists Faye Driscoll and Unusual Symptoms invite us to settle in and examine our attention. With dramaturgy and writing by Dages Juvelier Keates, the production crafts environments in which details accrete into scenes of compounding complexity. Nothing is lost: voices, props, and costumes appear, fall apart, and recycle themselves iteratively. We are infinitely cannibalized, undone, remixed, and yet, we seek for constancy. What do we do with the shape that we are in? Performed at Kleines Haus, Theater Bremen, Germany, 2022.
Alexa Echoes (2020-2021) A film in the mode of a chamber opera by visual artist Amanda Turner Pohan in collaboration with composer Charlie Looker, choreographer Dages Juvelier Keates and performer Katy Pinke. The first iteration in a series of three performances, Alexa Echoes recasts the relationship between cultural movements and commercial technologies through the history of women’s devocalization and disembodiment. Organized by Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies class of 2020, working with EMPAC curator Vic Brooks. Documentation upon request. Performed online at EMPAC (Troy, New York)
Winterlight (2020) An eleven track digital album of poetry and practice for Covid winter. Practice somatic inquiry into the kidneys are reservoirs of inheritance without the tyranny of the visual. In collaboration with Joshua Dumas. Text and performance by Dages Juvelier Keates, music/mixing/mastering by Joshua Dumas.
The Nothing (2019) A dance piece in a noxious all-inclusive getaway. Washed up and in a post-solar-storm, Dages Juvelier Keates and Erin Cairns Cella (concept and performance) as E/D inhabit a place turned into a repetition compulsion. Aboard a hypnotic score by composer Jascha Narveson, E/D grapples with being an “us” without a “them” in a world without Truth. Sharknado, scratch and sniff, it’s a party in the USA. Presented by Triskelion Arts (New York, USA). Score by Jascha Narveson. Text by Dages Juvelier Keates. Video by Joshua Dumas. Light design by David Glista. Documentation upon request.
Contact/Crisis (2018) A commissioned duet with Alexis Steeves as part of L’intrus, curated by Natasha Marie Llorens. Moving in dialogue with Jean Luc Nancy’s essay, and the exhibited works, the performance practice is set to an individualized score designed for earbuds by Joshua Dumas. Text and performance by Dages Juvelier Keates and Alexis Steeves. Documentation upon request (recording in Arabic, Basque, English, Estonian, French, German, Hebrew, Norwegian, Sinhala, Spanish, Swedish). Tabakalera International Centre for Contemporary Culture (Donostia, Spain). Reimagined for Yolande Milan Batteau/Callidus Guild at The Park Avenue Armory.
Mr. Weinstein Will See You Now (2018) Performer in music video by Amanda Palmer & Jasmine Power. Directed by Noemie Lafrance.
You Move Me (2017) Words are important. Language congealed from Dages Juvelier Keates and Alexis Steeves’ combined seventy years of studio practice form a geological layer of contact, a sediment in the space we all inhabit. They explore the possibilities of intimacy with each other with observers, and with various affective, socio-bio bodies in a sonic space imbued with increasingly explicit texts. They respond, relax, and refine their attention to the surfaces and scale of skin and gaze. Text by Keates and Steeves. Sound design by Joshua Dumas. Curated by Natasha Marie Llorens, with Alexa West. At Amanda Turner Pohan’s Two Forty Space. Documentation upon request.
#RESIST (2017) Performer in dance work by chameckilerner. #RESIST uses the pelvis as a “weapon” of provocation, liberation and ultimately, of protest. The premise is simple, inclusive, and communal; an invitation to activate our bodies in the act of resistance. Sanctuary performance at San Damiano Mission Church in New York, during Armory 2017.
Free Your Flocking Clown (2016-2017) HAM: High-Art-Mo(ve)ment performance project is a collaboration between Amélie Gaulier, Dages Juvelier Keates, Rain Saukas and Alexis Steeves. The Free Your Flocking Clown series has engaged of concepts of sex, truth, linguistics, projective identification and sovereignty in the the Trump era. Documentation upon request.
Free Your Flocking Clown 5: Post Truth Edition (2017) at Center for Performance Research (New York, USA). Post-truth edition. We are French, we are Estonian, we are American. We benefit from white privilege we buckle under patriarchy. We are immigrants, actors, activists, aggressors, deflectors. We consider: autocracy, projective identification, having a voice and being alone together.
Free Your Flocking Clown 4: Fact Check (2017) at Brooklyn Arts Exchange (New York, USA). We wonder: Is there a post-humanist self? Are we only human? What moves us in and out of our private physical island? Can we see the shadow of the icebergs of our embodied archive?
Free Your Flocking Clown 3: USA (2016) at Triskelion Arts (New York, USA). 2016 Election edition. We are immigrants, we are women, we are queer, we are Jews. We benefit from white privilege we buckle under patriarchy. We are actors, activists, aggressors, deflectors. We consider: looming, listening, projective identification, and the sniffling of Donald Trump. Sound collaborator: Joshua Dumas
Free Your Flocking Clown: SEX (2016) at Dixon Place curated by Doug Post (New York, USA) We are dancing in the anthropocene. We are alone together. We are a flock of humans. We wonder: Is there a post-humanist self? Are we only human? What moves us in and out of our private physical island? Can we see the shadow of the icebergs of our embodied archive? Special Guest: Claire Astruc. Sound Design: Joshua Dumas
Free Your Flocking Clown: Gallery Edition (2016) at “Permission Slip” at Art Helix (New York, USA). Embodying insights from Ranciere, Agamben, and the fluffiest sheep on earth... The inaugural flocking experiment with special guest Claire Astruc. Curated by Wilson Duggan and Jackie Cantwell.
Unsee (2017) Four hour durational performance by HAM as part of The Neo Domestic Performance Art Festival at Glasshouse (New York, USA). Concept and performance by Amélie Gaulier, Dages Juvelier Keates, Rain Saukas and Alexis Steeves with wearable sculptures by ntilit. By engaging notions of what is private and what is shared, this performance offers unexpected recognition. Responsibility, expression, intimacy and irreverence are all at stake as the personal transitions to the collective and back again. The experience and investment of both performer and audience is infinitely unfolding - making space and time for new ways of seeing, embodying and being within the haptic world we cohabitate. Documentation upon request.
Porous Torus and Empathicity (2016-2017) HAM works with the interactive sculptures of Shani Ha, questioning the body in its rapport with intimacy, otherness, and the public. These sculptures extend the body and become social prosthesis that one can appropriate to create new contexts of proximity. Performance by Amélie Gaulier, Dages Juvelier Keates, Rain Saukas and Alexis Steeves with wearable sculptures of Shani Ha's Embody project. At Dixon Place and Central Park as part of New York City’s Central Park with NYC ParksxArts (USA). Documentation upon request.
BOUNCE BOUNCE (2016) Friedrich Nietzsche and his latter-day avatar Kelly Clarkson assert "That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger." We wonder. E/D’s latest work thinks with Robin James’ Resilience & Melancholy: pop music, feminism, neoliberalism and unpacks the assumption that physical resiliency and emotional buoyancy are inextricably linked. The pursuit of bodily perfection and control dominates concert dance training and femininity. As such, physical performance becomes bound up with pleasure in–and identification with– an able, flexible, legible body-- a body that performs “strong woman.” What happens when we can’t or don’t bounce back? Using Erin’s pregnancy, sound, light, and affect as material, E/D inhabits composer Jascha Narveson’s deep bass soundscapes with lighting by David Glista. Presented by Triskelion Arts’ “Split Bill” series (New York, USA). Documentation upon request.
Unfold Into (2016) City and City curator Natasha Marie Llorens invited Dages Juvelier Keates to create a performance work on Elizabeth Tubergen’s sculpture Invert in a sound environment by Helene Kazan. The performance (with Amelie Gaulier, Rain Saukas, and Alexis Steeves) nominally took place in the gallery, but the audience was invited to view it from the sidewalk of 5th Avenue. Keates’ work will attend to the interstice, to space between the Cities. At Parsons/The New School Aronson Galleries and the Kellen Auditorium (New York, USA). Sound: Joshua Dumas. Material consultant: Kerry Downey. Documentation upon request.
Corners (2016) Movement direction for music video growing out of The Armory Sessions, a multiyear artist-driven salon co-founded by Ximena Borges and Dages Juvelier Keates. Art pop singer XI.ME.NA from New York/Venezuela uses her voice to create neoclassical, vocally-driven, ambient, electronica music. Produced by Joe Rogers, these are love songs, nourished by poetry and beset by the spirit of music. Directed by Dani Prados.
all i have are sensations (2014-2016) Tensed between the grotesque and the seductive, E/D’s athletic movement vocabulary, tightly crafted vignettes and pop-infused punctuation challenge expectations of what viewers feel and see when looking at "women." By turns pointlessly driven and precisely manicured, this work questions: what if resistance to normative forms of femininity is just a glitch, an involuntary refusal to function? What happens when the invisible becomes hyper-visible? Concept and performance by E/D (Erin Cairns Cella & Dages Juvelier Keates). Sonic landscape built by new music composer Jascha Narveson. Presented by Temple University (Philadelphia, USA, 2016), Triskelion Arts “Split Bill” (New York, USA, 2015), Northside Festival (New York, USA, 2015), Art Seed at Marble House Residency (Vermont, USA, 2015). Documentation upon request.
flamingo flamingo (2011-2016) Sex and humor, rage and feathers. Avian lawn ornaments become real live adolescents. Conceived by Tanya Calmoneri/Company Sogono, created with and performed by Erin Cairns Cella and Dages Juvelier Keates. Costumes by Mioko Mochizuki. Presented by Triskelion Arts Presents, “Comedy in Dance,” Annual Benefit, FLICfest at Irondale, Dixon Place “Crossing Boundaries,” Cool New York Dance Festival at WHITE WAVE, Temple University, Northside Festival, Marble House Project Gala. Documentation upon request.
The Fastest Planet (2015) Performer. Conceived and directed by Mårten Spångberg. Presented by Movement Research at Judson Memorial Church.
Oo oo (2015) a short produced by E/D (choreography and performance), Karla Carballar (video artist) , NTILIT (wearable sculpture), and Joshua Dumas (musical composition). A shape emerged in the context of our intercultural and interdisciplinary dialogue grounded in South Williamsburg. Our film questions the possibilities of our bodies as transient transmitters, ephemeral archives in an urban space. A city, like a body, is a shape that comes from a layering- repetitions of gesture, sensation, experience lead to psychic representation. Like mycelial threads that bloom into mushrooms, bodies become visible through accretions of breath, striations of spatiotemporal experience. Selected for inclusion in the Transmit Film Festival.
Bird Suite 2011-2015 An evening-length dance theater piece conceived and directed by Tanya Calamoneri for Company Sogono. Performers Erin Cairns Cella, Christine Coleman, Dages Juvelier Keates, Soraya Odishoo, and Mariko Reynolds. Sound by Soraya Odishoo and Danny Tunick. Costumes by Mioko Mochizuki. Supported by NYSCA. Presented by Dixon Place, Irondale (FLICfest), John Ryan Theatre (Cool NY), Temple University, Colgate University, and Triskelion Arts, NYC
Born for Nothing Sound Bytes (2015) is Lydian Junction’s attempt at survival, as individuals and as a collective. It’s about finding structure in the unstructured, revolution in the everyday. These are the songs. By Lydian Junction, a cohort of five artists working at the intersection of performance, video art, installation, and music: Christopher Berg, Oliver Burns, Karla Carballar, Dages Juvelier Keates and Sarah Cameron Sunde. Additional songs by Joshua Dumas. At Cornelia Street Cafe (New York, USA)
Nocturne for Bob (2014) Conceived and choreographed by Aileen Passloff, performed by Charlotte Hendrickson and Dages Juvelier Keates. Part of Remy Charlip I Love You. The 92nd Street Y memorializes Remy Charlip with tributes by Aileen Passloff, Lance Westergard, David Vaughan, Barbara Roan, Rob Dabney, Toby Armour, H.T. Chen, Mary Seidman and Arthur Aviles.
Tatiana’s Shadow (2014) Performer. Victoria’s Shadow is an over the top abstract otherworldly murder/soap/mystery, a mini history of the fall and rise of mankind incorporating chorus lines, the butoh dance medium with layers of social/political commentary and ideas of reincarnation. A shifting soundscape by Hastings incorporates themes from Dark Shadows, Twin Peaks, Vampire Knights, Barry Lyndon and Jacques Tati films/tv. Conceived of and choreographed by Celeste Hastings for The Butoh Rockettes. Performed by Celeste Hastings, Christine Coleman, Jil Guyon, Dages Juvelier Keates, Aya Shibahara and Ian Wen. Presented by 92stY and HERE Arts Center (New York, USA).
Born for Nothing (2013-2014) Inspired very loosely by Knut Hamsun’s novel HUNGER and New York City’s current relationship to sea-water which, experts predict, will soon engulf us, Lydian Junction weaves a contemporary story of individual daily survival taken to the extreme. By Lydian Junction (Christopher Berg, Oliver Burns, Karla Carballar, Dages Juvelier Keates and Sarah Cameron Sunde) Assisted by Tegan Ritz MacDuffie. Wearables by Ntalia Roumelioti/Ntilit. Additional songs by Joshua Dumas. Supported by residency and performances at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center (New York, USA, 2014) and Chashama (New York, USA, 2013)
Satan in Drag (2013) Historically, Lilith’s narrative was passed down through oral tradition, living only in the moment it was spoken aloud. We connect to this perishability of form, and utilize performance to investigate Lilith in real-time, undermining current social constructions of sexuality, gender, time and the body. Concept by Dages Juvelier Keates with Lydian Junction: Chirs Berg, Oliver Burns, Karla Carballar, Sarah Cameron Sunde. Installation by Anna Kiraly. Mask by Ebony White. Supported by residency and performances “The Room” at New Georges. Photography by Fitz Patton for Chance Magazine.
Yantra (2013) Performer. Choreographed by Maureen Fleming. Presented at Lamama’s La Galleria (New York, USA)
Choreography for “Cliteracy” (2013) Choreography and solo performance for Sophia Wallace’s “Cliteracy,” Presented by The Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY (USA)
Projections (2013) Short by Soraya Odishoo. Performance and choreography by Dages Juvelier Keates and Diane Vreeland
The Ecdysiast (2012/15) Solo performer. Choreographed by Lenore Latimer. Performed by Dages Juvelier Keates. Presented by 92stY (NYC)
The Matter/2012: Art & Archive (2012) Performer. Choreographed and Directed by David Gordon. Presented by Danspace Project's as part of PLATFORM 2012: Judson Now at St. Mark’s Church, NYC
Spring Pictures of the Floating World (2012) a two-part performance art installation, reimagining 17th Century Japanese Shunga — pillow books — and their 5,000-year-old Chinese inspiration. Performer and choreographer. Installation by Anna Kiraly. Directed by Sarah Cameron Sunde. Presented by Peculiar Works Project at LaMama Annex, NYC
What Counts (2012) Live performance by Lydian Junction: Christopher Berg, Oliver Burns, Karla Carballar, Dages Juvelier Keates and Sarah Cameron Sunde at “Mundane Fantasy” at Brooklyn Arts Exchange, 3LD Art and Technology Center, (un)fair art show, an alternative to the Armory Art Fair one block away. Supported by Marcelo Anez. Photography and feedback by Sophia Wallace.
Revolution (2011) Live performance by Lydian Junction presented by Hybrid Theater Works at Alwan Arts Center (New York, USA)
To the Table (2011) Live performance by Lydian Junction, presented on Governor’s Island at Figment Festival (New York, USA)
Brain Code Brain (2011) Live performance by Lydian Junction, and special guest presented at New Georges Trunk Show at Cornelia Street Cafe (New York, USA)
Cosmosis (2011-2012) Concept and choreography in collaboration with performers Rachel Lane and visual artists Adrienne Barr Chait and Halsey Chait. Presented by Movement Research’s Open Performance held in the DTW Studios (moderated by Ben Spatz), the John Ryan Theater, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and Drisha (New York, USA)
The Art of Dreaming (2011) Performance of “Insect Queen” Written and directed by Bob DeNatale, music by Lenny Gonzales and cinematography by Che Broadnax, with actors Walker Hare and Kate Villanova.
Dreams of Pan (2011) Choreographer and solo performer. Concept, music, and direction by Jacob Robinette, as part of “Dreams and Intoxications,” a conceptual preview of new work by Robinette; musical performances by two of trumpeter Jordan McLean's ensembles, the Piano Music & Song Trio (PMT), and, in debut, Occasional Noise & Vibration Associated (ONVA); and dance performances by Princess Lockeroo, Dages Juvelier Keates, and others. Presented at Alwan Arts Center (NYC)
White Box Project (2011) Performer. Choreographed and Conceived by Noémie Lafrance. Staged within the confines of the gallery’s ‘white walls’, the minimalist dance performance challenges the implied separation between the art object and its viewing subject. Presented at Black and White Gallery (New York, USA)
Life Sentence (2011) Movement direction for music video by Eprhyme, directed by Lenny Bass, co-producer Amy Smith
Prayer Collection (2010) Conception and performance by Dages Juvelier Keates. Original sound with Elana Bell, Rachel Ravitz, and Basya Schechter. Presented at ATARA, curated by Miriam Leah (Droz) Gamliel at Merkin Hall, NYC
CV available upon request
Weathering, 2023
In Weathering, sound and breath can’t be sourced to just one body. We aren't sure where it comes from, where it goes to, to whom it belongs, how far it extends. Whose voice is that? Whose breath?
Our skin is guessing, like a blanket brained with microfilaments: where do I begin? Where does the other end?
If we cannot feel close enough for impact, we feel more alone with each other and on the planet. How much is the Anthropocene a kind of species sense loss?
How do we not turn away when we don't know what to do? How might we thicken our attention to the knots, nodes, and coils of ambiguous realities? Multispecies feminist scholar Donna Haraway calls for cultivating a capacity to “stay with the trouble” even when we feel split, cut off, numbed out, fragmented. Our tool is attention, and this ritual is a presence practice.
Written by Dages Juvelier Keates
In her latest creation, artist Faye Driscoll and her team of collaborators ask: How do we feel the impact of events moving through us which are so much larger? Yet are animating and activating our bodies all the time? How do we get closer to the impact? Can we slow down enough to feel the dust, hurt, howl, absence, spill, plume?
Dramaturgy by Dages Juvelier Keates, performed at New York Live Arts, NYC.
Calving, 2022
A body is a breath that accretes over time. A glacier is a very slow ocean, an accumulation of tides held in seemingly solid form: time, literally, crystallized. We can't see movement in a monolith, but feel rumbling below, a simultaneously ancient and urgent call. Under the skin surface, aquifers pool, rivulets gather, surge, bubble up, break open.
The seas part, the ice calves.
In beginnings and endings, births and deaths, when the One becomes the Many, we encounter the miraculous horrific. What is called “the world” tumesces to a point from which cracking open is inevitable. Our bodies, like the planet, are mostly water, and these temporary ingatherings spill, seethe, and surge into each other. Buddhist philosophy posits the body as a convergence of five rivers. In the old sutras as in the theory of relativity, the same unfathomable reality: nothing stands still. Perceptions are changing, cells dying in becoming. We are infinitely cannibalized, undone, remixed, and yet, we seek for constancy. What do we do with the shape that we are in?
Written by Dages Juvelier Keates
Faye Driscoll is known for works that place complex demands on the senses and make the audience aware of their own involvement in the action. Her productions in the USA have been shown at festivals such as the Venice Biennale, Festival d'Automne à Paris and the Melbourne Festival. Calving was produced with Unusual Symptoms, with Dramaturgy by Dages Juvelier Keates.
CALVING Premiered June 2022, at the Kleines Haus, Theater Bremen, Bremen, Germany
Alexa Echoes, 2021
Alexa Echoes is a film in the mode of a chamber opera by visual artist Amanda Turner Pohan in collaboration with composer Charlie Looker, choreographer Dages Juvelier Keates and performer Katy Pinke. The first iteration in a series of three performances, Alexa Echoes recasts the relationship between cultural movements and commercial technologies through the history of women’s devocalization and disembodiment. It begins with mythical Greek figures, such as Echo, and leads up to Amazon’s smart speaker and digital voice-based assistant, Alexa.
In this film, EMPAC is concurrently the site of production, setting, and subject that surrounds three manifestations of the voice: candid, staged, and disembodied. As in much of Pohan’s interdisciplinary oeuvre, the film looks at the body’s complicated relationship to technology as it relates to autonomy, animation, and the melismatic sound of breath. Alexa Echoes incorporates movement, speech, and an orchestral score to abstract the gendered decisions that frame new media technologies, gesturing to the corporate entities which choreographed them.
The film will be released on EMPAC’s website on Thursday, February 4 at 5PM (EST) followed by a conversation between Amanda Turner Pohan and curator Marisa Espe. This project is accompanied by a text version of the project’s script.
Alexa Echoes is organized by Muheb Esmat, Marisa Espe, Bergen Hendrickson, Ciena Leshley, Ana Lopes, Liz Lorenz, Brooke Nicolas, Elizaveta Shneyderman, and Rachel Vera Steinberg from Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies class of 2020, working with EMPAC curator Vic Brooks.
amplify the nothing, 2020
E/D is the collaborative alter-ego of artists Erin Cairns Cella and Dages Juvelier Keates. Approaching themselves as “performance clay,” their practice investigates liminality on somatic, cognitive, and imagistic levels. Their work has been presented through Triskelion Arts Split Bill Festival, Triskelion Arts Presents, Temple University, Marble House Project’s Art-Seed, Northside Festival, Women in Motion’s Rooftop Salon, Fourth Arts Block’s FAB Festival, Gowanus Art and Production’s First Look, Gibney Dance’s Show and Share, Center for Performance Research’s Spring Movement, New York University’s Master’s Thesis Showcase, and Movement Research’s Open Performance.
It’s not not about power
It’s not not about change
It’s not not about hope
It’s not not about now
It’s not not about our bodies
It’s not not about nothing
By E/D: Erin Cairns Cella and Dages Juvelier Keates
Sound: Jascha Narveson
Video: Joshua Dumas
Lighting Design: David Glista
Presented by Triskelion Arts
Contact / Crisis, 2018
A commissioned duo performance practice that took place in this space during the opening of the exhibition. Keates and Steeves contextualized their movement in somatic principles rather than shape seeking. Moving from the idea that the heart is an organ that empties and fills simultaneously, that limbs hang from the alien inside, the duo approached the body’s otherness with tentative vigilance and profound respect. Keates and Steeves describe their intention: “The Other is inherited. The Other is immediate. The Other cannot be contained. The Other cannot be shamed. The Other is always here: the one I run from in dreams, in effort, in time. The Other is inside all of us who have m/others.”
By Dages Juvelier Keates and Alexis Steeves
Sound by Joshua Dumas
Commissioned for L’Intrus (2018), commissioned by Natasha marie Llorens at Tabakalera
Reimagined for Callidus Guild at The Park Avenue Armory, also 2018
Free Your Flocking Clown (2016-2017)
By HAM: Amélie Gaulier, Dages Juvelier Keates, Rain Saukas and Alexis Steeves
Your Flocking Clown: Post Truth Edition (2017) at CPR
Post-truth edition. We are French, we are Estonian, we are American. We benefit from white privilege we buckle under patriarchy. We are immigrants, actors, activists, aggressors, deflectors. We consider: autocracy, projective identification, having a voice and being alone together.
Free Your Flocking Clown: Fact Check (2017) at BAX
We wonder: Is there a post-humanist self? Are we only human? What moves us in and out of our private physical island? Can we see the shadow of the icebergs of our embodied archive?
Free Your Flocking Clown: USA (2016) at Triskelion Arts
2016 Election edition. We are immigrants, we are women, we are queer. We benefit from white privilege we buckle under patriarchy. We are actors, activists aggressors, deflectors. We consider: looming, listening, projective identification, and the sniffling of Donald Trump. Sound collaborator: Joshua Dumas
Free Your Flocking Clown: SEX (2016) at Dixon Place
We are dancing in the anthropocene. We are alone together. We are a flock of humans. We wonder: Is there a post-humanist self? Are we only human? What moves us in and out of our private physical island? Can we see the shadow of the icebergs of our embodied archive? Special Guest: Claire Astruc. Sound Design: Joshua Dumas
Free Your Flocking Clown: Gallery Edition (2016) at “Permission Slip” at Art Helix
Embodying insights from Ranciere, Agamben, and the fluffiest sheep on earth... The inaugural flocking experiment with special guest Claire Astruc. Curated by Wilson Duggan and Jackie Cantwell
BOUNCE BOUNCE, 2016
"That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger."
- Friedrich Nietzsche (and Kelly Clarkson)
Inspired by images of floating buoys, pop-diva feminism, and the notion of a “strong woman,” E/D’s latest work, Bounce Bounce, unpacks the assumption that physical resiliency and emotional buoyancy are inextricably linked. This choreographic and sonic research complicates narratives of resiliency embedded in performances of femininity. The pursuit of bodily perfection and control dominates concert dance training and femininity. As such, physical performance becomes bound up with pleasure in, and identification with, an able, flexible, legible body-- a body that performs “strong woman.” Such bodies perform a kind of resiliency, but what happens when we can’t or don’t bounce back?
Using sound, light, imagination, and affect as material, E/D inhabits composer Jascha Narveson’s arresting soundscapes with lighting by David Glista.
Commissioned and presented by Triskelion Arts Presents
Choreography and Performance by E/D: Erin Cairns Cella & Dages Juvelier Keates
Music by Jascha Narveson
Costumes by E/D
Unsee, 2017
Unsee is an invitation to perceive what's known anew. Throughout the duration of this 3-4 hour performance the audience is guided to an indirect and temporary investment of a personal object or piece of clothing. These volunteered materials will be continuously combined and converted into wearable sculptures by ntilit. HAM will activate, inhabit and embody each fresh piece, folding it into, and eventually out of, the performance. Four dancers and one artist-designer - proposing, finding, fumbling, stating, entangling and unraveling what is seen and re-seen. By engaging and intriguing notions of what's private and what's shared this performance offers unexpected recognition. Responsibility, expression, intimacy and irreverence are all at stake as the personal transitions to the collective and back again. The experience and investment of both performer and audience is infinitely unfolding - making space and time for new ways of seeing, embodying and being within the haptic world we cohabitate.
Presented by The Neo Domestic Performance Art Festival at Glasshouse
By HAM with Ntilit
YOU MOVE ME, 2017
YOU MOVE ME is an evening of performances dedicated to movement curated for TWOFORTY by Natasha Marie Llorens. The faux velour inflatable couch with inset cup holders makes so many decisions for the body. Alexa West wants to know what is left for movement to discover. It is so difficult to find another body in time anew, ungoverned by projection and structural violence. Dages Juvelier Keates asks what the role of language is in attenuating that difficulty. YOU MOVE ME signals no virtue with movement, but understands it as a way to think about what is happening to us now, which is not the same as structural analysis because the body is excessive of that kind of thought, constitutively.
Dages Juvelier Keates and Alexis Steeves propose a conversation between two dancers who are relaxing open, listening, articulating what Rosalind Crisp calls “news from the body.” Words are important. Language congealed from Keates and Steeves’ combined seventy years of studio practice form a layer of contact, a sediment in the space we all inhabit. They will explore the possibilities of intimacy with each other, with observers, and with various affective, socio-bio bodies as they respond, relax, and refine their attention to the surfaces and scale of skin and gaze. Sound design by Joshua Dumas.
unfold into, 2016
Curated by Natasha marie Llorens as part of City and City at Parsons/The New School
with Amelie Gaulier, Rain Saukas, and Alexis Steeves
Dages Juvelier Keates invited Gaulier, Saukas, and Steeves to perform in tandem with a sculpture by Elizabeth Tubergen in a sound environment by Helene Kazan. The dance will nominally take place in the gallery, but the audience is invited to view it from the sidewalk of 5th Avenue. Keates’ work will attend to the interstice, to space between the Cities.
i will incorporate your symptoms
i will put them into my body
i will contain you although i cannot hope to contain myself
one pours and one watches
one speaks and one listens
what is the amplitude of the voice?
how far does the sound travel
a terrain of tenderness
the real issue is the split that reifies the boundaries
Sunday, September 18th, 5 – 7pm
Aronson Galleries and the Kellen Auditorium, next to the gallery
sound: Joshua Dumas
material consultant: Kerry Downey
Flamingo Flamingo, 2011-2016
Directed by Tanya Calamoneri for Company SoGoNo
Created with and performed by Erin Cairns Cella and Dages Juvelier Keates
Costumes by Mioko Mochizuki
Presented by Triskelion Arts Presents, “Comedy in Dance,” Annual Benefit, FLICfest at Irondale, Dixon Place “Crossing Boundaries,” Cool New York Dance Festival at WHITE WAVE, Temple University, Northside Festival, Marble House Project Gala
"Sexy poses and “hey look at me” hip shaking were interspersed with humorous, teeth-baring grimaces that verged on the grotesque, hinted at rage, and highlighted the bizarre."
- See more impressions by Veronica Hackethal for Dance Enthusiast.
Porous Torus, 2016
A quartet with the interactive sculptures of Shani Ha which question the body in its rapport with intimacy and otherness. These sculptures extend the body and become social prosthesis that one can appropriate to create new contexts of proximity.
Shani Ha's Embody project is a response to everyday social interactions and body representations. The series incarnate these shifting social boundaries and representations through transformative “Body Sculptures”
By HAM: Amélie Gaulier, Alexis Steeves, Dages Juvelier Keates, Rain Saukas
In collaboration with the visual designer Shani Ha
Curated by Doug Post for “Under Exposed” at Dixon Place
all i have are sensations, 2015
In all i have are sensations, E/D utilizes low frequency sound, light, and a range of physical tension to explore how physical sensations are felt, blurred, and heightened. By turns pointlessly driven and precisely manicured, this work questions: what if resistance to normative forms of femininity is just a glitch, an involuntary refusal to function? What happens when the invisible becomes hyper-visible? This play on tension asserts control, yet rends us powerless by forces stronger, older, bigger than ourselves. Erin and Dages are caught between dichotomies such as threat and safety, containment and abandon, monstrosity and beauty, and fast and slow. An athletic movement vocabulary, tightly crafted vignettes and pop-infused punctuation challenge expectations of what viewers feel and see when looking at "women." Sonic landscape built by new music composer Jascha Narveson.
Choreography and Performance by E/D: Erin Cairns Cella & Dages Juvelier Keates
Music by Jascha Narveson
Presented by Temple University (2016), Triskelion Arts “Split Bill” (2015), Northside Festival (2015), Art Seed at Marble House Residency (2015)
Satan In Drag, 2013
Historically, Lilith’s narrative was passed down through oral tradition, living only in the moment it was spoken aloud. We connect to this perishability of form, and utilize performance to investigate Lilith in real-time, undermining current social constructions of sexuality, gender, time and the body.
Popular representations portray a feminist rebel who subverts androcentrism and enjoys a liberal expression of her own will and sexuality. In traditional narratives, she is imagined as a woman created before Eve who refuses to lie beneath her husband during sex. In later Kabbalistic texts, she is literally figured as the wife of Satan, or even Satan in the guise of a female. The mythic Lilith is revered as an exemplary heroine, suspected as a seductress, and despised as a bloodthirsty child-murderer. Her myth is remarkably adaptive and tenacious. With SATAN IN DRAG, we ask: why?
Imagine walking into a labyrinth of fabric with only a headlamp to light your way. Your aural experience is variegated: chanting, panting, buzzing, slurping. Perhaps you are drawn towards the center of the room by intermittent light from your headlamp, the flash of a projected image, or the green smell of wet earth. There, in extremely high heels, a masked body works furtively, like a spider unable to escape her own web or stand on her own two feet. This body, morphing into a series of archetypal images, is trapped in a square patch of moss, held in place by the fabric installation which is revealed to be her garment, web, and captor.
As Lilith is a projection of our fears, we use video to literally project these fears onto the performer’s body. Inspired by Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” the video layers grotesque images of bodily animality, sexuality, and enactments of aggression with more abstract images from nature. Like our own repressed issues, the projected images can’t be seen when we shine light on them directly - instead they creep out and surprise us sideways. Lilith is an oral construction, and the audience helps to construct the experience SATAN IN DRAG. Prior to entering the installation, they interact with a microphone and their captured sounds are looped and integrated into our soundscape. Through their choices of words, pitch, noises, as well as light and movement once in the space, the audience is woven directly into the work’s structure. Expressing both agency and captivity, each person’s participation conceals or reveals another dimension of the installation.
By Lydian Junction, a cohort of five artists working at the intersection of performance, video art, installation, and music: Christopher Berg, Oliver Burns, Karla Carballar, Dages Juvelier Keates and Sarah Cameron Sunde
Supported by residency and performances “The Room” at New Georges
Scenic Installation with Anna Kiraly
Mask by Ebony White
Photography by Chance Magazine
Full photo spread in Chance Magazine Volume 2
POMP, 2022
Collaboration with Alexis Steeves, experienced at Vasastaden, Stockholm Sweden, February 2022
Photographs by Åke Ericson