Do a dance. Tear it down. Remix.

Runway, stage show, club party, this is an experiment in becoming fierce, fragile, and unadorned. The work asks: What agency does a dancer have (and not have) over a work and how do they insert their own values into the work?

Exploring the politics of aesthetics and the role of a delegated performer, Mash Up Body is comprised of two parts: First Watson-Wallace made a dance. Second, she asked the cast to remix and destroy the systems of the original dance, on the spot, in front of the audience.

Mash Up Body is a meditation on agency, radical presence, and embedded patriarchy in the art world. This dance asks, in the words of bell hooks: what “white supremacist capitalist patriarchal” values am I taking on in my rehearsal process and work, and how can this shift? It is a practice in understanding form as politic.

“When I got into the room with the dancers, there was a moment when they had very clear ideas about what they wanted to explore that I hadn’t gotten to. So we went there. It became the structure of the piece. There was something I was trying to understand about what a feminist rehearsal space operated like.” Kate Watson-Wallace, choreographer of Mash Up Body.

Direction and choreography
Kate Watson-Wallace
Conceptual collaborator and music composition
Christopher Sean Powell
Visual and costume design
Kate Watson-Wallace
Dancers
Jasmine Hearn
Cori Olinghouse
Melanie Cotton
devynn emory (Friday & Saturday only)
Haylee Nichele (Friday & Saturday only)
Danielle Currica
Ann-Marie Gover
Live electronics
HPrizm
Dramaturg
Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
Outside eye/spirit guide
Miguel Gutierrez

$20 / Students 25-and-under $15 / Members save 30%