“We are perceivers. We are an awareness. We are not objects. We have no solidity. The world of objects and solidity is a way of making our passage on earth convenient.” Michael Talbot

When the mundanity of everyday life crashes into psychic phenomena it helps to have a guide.

Jean & Terry are a housewife and her spirit guide. They are alter egos for a neurotic choreographer and her zen-ed out collaborator, a pair of mountains, and a team of gods who smile from above. They are me and they are you.

In their new experimental play and self-described form of psychic activism, choreographers and performing artists Melissa Krodman and Kelly Bond peer with a curious and open third eye into ideas of the Universal Consciousness. The performers stage their attempts at seeking one-ness, achieving telepathy, elevating our collective vibrational frequencies, and acknowledging the impossibility of it all. Set against a journey across the astral plane, Jean & Terry asks us to consider what we are made of and what, if anything, separates us.

Featuring performer-creators Mark McCloughan and Jaime Maseda, along with Ilan Bachrach’s video design and music composition by Greg Svitil.

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$15 (student + 25-and-under)

About Kelly Bond and Melissa Krodman

Kelly and Mel are creators and performers of experimental dance and theatre. They met and began working together in 2010 in Washington, DC, and have since continued their “open yet committed” collaborative relationship of making, touring, and teaching despite living 1200 miles apart (Kelly in New Orleans and Mel in Philly). Their longish-term use of synchronized movement, co-scheduling, and repeated actions and interactions over time have resulted in telepathic thinking and record high levels of mutual friendship and love. Their work together focuses on theories, experimentations, and developing techniques of choreographing the spectator–in particular, exploring the energies and potentialities of a performative environment, utilizing the intangible yet present qualities of that environment to further a work’s themes.

Kelly and Mel were 2015 visiting artists at The Lucky Penny’s Work Room in Atlanta; 2014-15 resident artists of thefidget space in Philadelphia, PA; and 2014 artists in residence and teaching artists of the Breaking Ground Series through The Lucky Penny/Theatre Emory in Atlanta.

Interview with Melissa Krodman

FringeArts: Can you discuss some of the background of JEAN & TERRY, where the work stems from?

Melissa Krodman: For us, the seeds for one piece are in the previous work, or putting it another way, it feels like when one piece is finished there are these loose threads that hang off of it and are begging to be tugged at. In the last piece we made together, Colony, we were still exploring herd consciousness—which was also the basis for Elephant, the piece before that. We’ve been interested in collective decision-making and behaviors for a long time. Through creating and performing Colony, we realized that, at least for us, this shared energy is a choreographic tool. We’ve seen so clearly that people are communicating non-verbally and predictably in audience environments all the time. These choices can be choreographed and integrated into a piece’s themes. We also realized that after years of performing synchronized movement, we experienced a synching of thoughts and an increase in telepathic communication.

FringeArts: Does the audience have a role in JEAN & TERRY? How do you perceive the audience when you are performing?

Melissa Krodman: A main interest of our work is the choreography of the spectator. We perceive the audience as always being absolutely necessary for fully executing a work’s ideas. We can execute the stagecraft without the audience, but the theatrical event needs the technical elements, the performers, the audience and our individual, as well as collective, energies to fully realize the piece. In this regard, we perceive the audience as a theatrical element or instrument to be concerned with, to learn how to “play” and to utilize in the full orchestration of the work. This seems obvious, but it’s something that can get left out of consideration by both theatrical works and viewing audiences. We also consider how audiences relate with one another; how audience members observe one another, form a culture, and behave as a group.

Further Reading

Kelly Bond and Melissa Krodman Interview, by Andrew Alexander, Burnaway

Excerpt: “We’ve been enjoying seeing how audiences pretty immediately establish their own set of rules,” says Krodman. “Each audience adheres to a set of rules, and there will be rule breakers, and the audience will then react to those rule breakers in various ways. It’s about the audience noticing themselves in the context of this communal event, witnessing how they’re choosing to behave in this environment. It’s really fascinating to see that herd consciousness at work and to notice how groups think without any talking or without any verbal communication. I hesitate to use the word ‘political,’ but there are some subtly political themes when you’re in this environment noticing how people choose to react to what’s happening.”

Bond says, “It’s interesting to note where people’s boundaries are, where other people are creating rules even though they may not necessarily exist for us.” Read the full article.