The Field, part 1 2024

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Choreography: Amelia Heintzelman, Leah Fournier
Text and Dramaturgy: Tess Michaelson

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Through attunement to presence, duration, and energetic tension, the work imagines an embodied field of poetic resonance that plays at a line of interpretative decipherability. Performers embark on an extended deconstruction of epic narrative iconography: the showdown, the rustler, the disillusioned lover. Each performer becomes an evolving multiplicity of characters, intertwining the dramatic and iconic with the mundane. Characters alter the psychic texture of the field as they exchange coded premonitions and distorted memories. The work culminates as a triangulation of competing interpretations, ownership over the metaphorical field, that, in the end, refuses possession at all and, instead, offers new possibilities for being together and apart at once.

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Movement Research at the Judson Church

New York, NY 

January 2024

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The Field, part 2 2024

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Choreography, Performance: Amelia Heintzelman, Leah Fournier, Tess Michaelson

Text: Tess Michaelson
Chorus: An Wu, Aya Wilson, Campbell Watson, Carlos Valladares, Jenna Taus, and Neva Guido

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Using improvisational scores for dancing and talking, "The Field, part 2" manipulates and uncovers the dynamic of the group, a public, the ensemble through interruptions, disbandment, and harmonization. Performers oscillate between moments of ambiguity and clarity, bold rhythmic shifts, and aesthetics of precision to de-center any one aesthetic or voice. Curated into the “Offerings” series at St Mary The Virgin Church by Leonor Mendes and Ro Miller. ​​​​​

Offerings at Church of St Mary the Virgin 
New York, NY 

August 2024

 

 

PRESS: 

The Work-in-Progress by Tess Michaelson for the Brooklyn Rail

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