Adjusted for Inflation (2018 - 2020)

Footage above is from the GO! Emerging Artist Commissioning Program showing at the STREB Lab for Action Mechanics, June 2019

performed by Kailey McCrudden and Nicole Loeffler-Gladstone

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Adjusted for Inflation was inspired in part by Douglas Hofstadter’s book, Gödel Escher Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, in which Hofstadter proposes “strange loops” in formal mathematical systems – loops which allow the systems in which they exist to “perceive themselves” – as a metaphor for consciousness. These strange loops, in the language of formal mathematics, are called recursive loops. 

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In Adjusted for Inflation, two dancers are sealed inside of inflatable vinyl balls.  Over time, the repeated gestures of this dance decay and germinate in correlation with the fatigue and exertion of the dancers, the momentum of the balls, and the rate at which an action affects the next of its kind in a chain.

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The development of this work was supported by the GO! Emerging Artist Commission at the Elizabeth STREB Lab for Action Mechanics (January-June 2019), by a residency at Mount Tremper Arts (April 2019), and by the Artist-in-Residence program at the Jonah Bokaer Arts Foundation / Chez Bushwick (September-December 2019).  It was scheduled to be performed in a DraftWork showing at Danspace Project in February 2020, but this performance was cancelled due to COVID-19.

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Adjusted for Inflation Rehearsal Footage (April 2019)

April 2019 rehearsal at Mount Tremper Arts for a DraftWork performance at Danspace Project, scheduled for February 2020 but canceled due to COVID-19

Dancers: Kailey McCrudden and Nicole Loeffler-Gladstone

Sound (live) by Ashur Rayis

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This iteration of Adjusted for Inflation would have combined the use of the inflatable balls (pictured in the video above this one, at the GO! showing at the STREB Lab for Action Mechanics) with the in-process material in this video

The Bramblewatlz (2018)

Work-in-progress residency showing at Mount Tremper Arts, April 2019

performed by: Kailey McCrudden, Nicole Loeffler-Gladstone, Dorothy Chen, Krissy Harris, and Thryn Saxon

Sound (live) by Ashur Rayis

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(This footage, most unfortunately, is not shot from the front, but rather, from an upstage-left corner, and, ridiculously, from above.)

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InThe Bramblewaltz, six dancers explore softness and power within accumulating patterns. Dancers use effort and ease dialectically as the choreography, like an atmosphere, presses in on them from all sides.  A set of rules is an invisible architecture that comes to life as the dancers fatigue. 

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The Bramblewaltz is a continuation of research started during the second half of the Fresh Tracks program at New York Live Arts, presented in an early iteration at the Fresh Tracks spring studio showing as The Tumblewreath, pictured below.

Fresh Tracks at New York Live Arts

studio showing, June 2017

performed by Sophie Sotsky, Dorothy Chen,

and Krissy Harris

sound by Ashur Rayis 

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In The Tumblewreath, three dancers explore softness and power within accumulating circular patterns. The movement’s languid style is thrown into tension by the dance’s formal, rule-bound score -- which features punishing repetition.

An accumulating circular movement pattern gradually wears out its dancers.  The choreography is a windmill, a formal structure that generates power.  As the choreography's patterns picks up speed, and the dancers fatigue, they must, paradoxically, relax, softening into momentum, into the arms of the dance itself.  Then they fly.  The dance churns softness into power.

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