TEACHING
Trio for Table, Chair, and Performer
boléro procedures II: lec/dem/fan/fic
choreography via SECT, inc.
text/performance: Josie Bettman
sound: Lavinia Eloise Bruce
boléro procedures II: lec/dem/fan/fic is a conceptual duet created for "A Night of Duets" organized by Juli Brandano at ing performance space in October 2021. The piece frames an encounter between a solo performer and the memory of her currently unavailable dance partner against a backdrop of projected text.
One time, in the dressing room on the fourth floor of New York City Center Studios, Maya Plisetskaya and Ida Rubinstein shared a pair of headphones and schemed about making a dance to Ravel's Boléro. In their sweaty post-class daze, the dancers forgot to exchange phone numbers and never followed up on their idea. Boléro (Club Edit) is a speculative dance that takes this missed connection as a point of departure.
6MG REGRESSION CYCLE 03/09/2020 was performed at Movement Research at the Judson Church on 03/09/2020 the week before COVID-19 shut NYC down. This dance maps the recurrence of dull urges in order to reveal the ways they are shifting all the time. It's almost always the same body, the same repetitive time. Gestures swallow back on themselves. Structures and forms riff on the habitual, simple and repetitive, at once heeding the desire to do the same thing over again, and resisting this force.
Original sound by Alex Kane
DECAY STUDY: LIGHTING INSTRUMENT--performed at the Living Gallery in Bushwick on 02/22/20--cycled through a palette of choreographic set-ups situating the performer's body behind a rear-projection screen supporting a live video feed. Choreographies lag, multiply, and vanish across the built architecture, projected light, and the performer's body. These materials stack up space, light, and time, distorting reality.
barely there
Performance & video:
MI Leggett and Josie Bettman
costumes: Official Rebrand
sound: Alex Kane
barely there documents a collaborative practice between MI Leggett and Josie Bettman which unfolded alongside the creation of Official Rebrand’s collection, collapse/convulse. In response to sudden constrictions of public life, two performers support one another, give too much weight, and fall down. Over time, their bodies and the garments they activate stretch into unfamiliar material configurations.
The composition that emerged from this creative process conveys a collision of intimacy and self-loss. it is both intensely personal and fully anonymous, depersonalized. Stopping short of constructing metaphorical associations between the materials and our everyday life, we adopt a more documentary approach.
barely there resembles the dynamics of daily life in quarantine: directly on top of each other, tied together, there's nowhere to go and it's hard to handle or even fully grasp the breadth of our responsibilities to one another. our efforts to create something in collaboration are inseparable from our mundane efforts to survive, and to help one another continue living.