Next Up

The Garden of Forking Paths

by Nichole Canuso Dance Company
at the Bok School
May 8th- June 17th

Then I'm pretty free, so if you're looking to hire someone, gimme a ringading.

Performance is a place to practice survival, to inoculate yourself against what is most uncomfortable in life: absurdity. Chaos. Lack of resolution. If the body is the locus of all earthly experience, performance is a place to put it under a microscope. Or a telescope.

My dances are magic, animistic, pop-spectacle church services. I find epic poetry in banal moments. In my work, there are the rhythms of different realms of culture: burlesque, standup comedy, church services, Dan Savage advice columns, viral videos, DJ remixes. I search for the ways those rhythms bounce off, morph into, manipulate, and illuminate the rhythms of my body: the rate of my breathing, the pace of my thoughts, the hormonal highs and lows of my menstrual cycle, and the glacial-yet-rapid aging of my body. The result are dances that sing with contrary value systems.

Cats! Love ‘em, and their obliviousness to the passage of time. Humans are not so lucky: we see our doom cresting over the horizon. What to do until we reach it? I propose: Remix dances the way Girl Talk remixes music. Rub our nipples on unsuspecting strangers. Let’s throw our deep cynicism and deep belief together in the ring watch them fight. Or hold hands. 

Let’s draft a new social contract. And pour glitter on it.