Saints (2017)
Choreographed by Tess Dworman
Performers: Laurel Atwell, Lydia Okrent, Angie Pittman
Live music by Grace Osborne
Lighting and Set Design: Elliott Cennetoglu
Photos by Maria Baranova
In her PS122 Ramp Residency, Tess experimented with merging very different kinds of choreographic and improvisational material to become part of the same world.
She initiated the process with a collage-like structure that pins together brief self-contained dances and situations varying in representationalism, abstraction, emptiness, realism, and fantasy. The performers conjure these qualities through scores that amplify ambiguity as a skill and the craft of oscillating between image and sensation.
Her work has always explored meaning by willfully obscuring it in different ways. This next piece goes farther down this road to challenge how nonsensical parts can exist all together while maintaining the integrity and feeling of wholeness.
