Works

This is the internet based archive of our major live performance works. Under each section you will be able to find a description of the piece along with photographs and/or on-line video documentation.

At any moment, we may encounter violence. Whether it takes the form of a tangible act of hostility or a subtler, psychological assault, one must move through a state of turbulence, allowing the resonance of aggression to shake our body and soul, so that we might eventually regain equilibrium. But what happens if you cannot process the information, if you cannot come to terms with the resulting anger, fear, and loss? What if the information is so incomprehensible that you find yourself asking the same questions over, and over and over again? What if you get caught in a never-ending loop?

This is the thematic core of our new work Loop Diver, an evening length dance theater piece that portrays an encounter with violence, and the attempts of its characters to escape from the resulting prisons of repetition. There is only one way out: they must dive into their psyche to destroy the loop, leaving them again in balance, but also forever changed.

This piece has been commissioned by the Lied Center for Performing Arts in Lincoln, Nebraska. It is scheduled for premiere there in October 2009.

"DIGITAL RUPTURES: I find the play of repetition and variation fascinating, knowing that the smart, valiant dancers are making on-the-spot decisions that affect the texture, loving their attentiveness to one another and to what they're creating together.... It's as if these people are numbly replaying the embedded residue of crises. Their mechanical precision both undermines and sets off their humanness."
– Deborah Jowitt, Village Voice

Lush imagery vibrates against funnel clouds of physicality as 100,000 years of human evolution are condensed into Troika Ranch’s evening length dance, theater and media performance 16 [R]evolutions. The work focuses on a single evolutionary path: how the animal drives of our pre-human ancestors have become sublimated to the point of abject confusion and disconnection. In stark contrast to this path, are exquisite three-dimensional visuals that warp and morph in direct response to the dancers movement, becoming more “animal” than the characters on stage. (At one moment the performers dance with delicate, living strands of DNA, at another, a gigantic digital rib cage ripples and breathes as it envelopes their movement.) 16 [R]evolutions asks the question, can we reconnect with our core needs to feed, fight and reproduce while continuing to evolve into beings of light and intellect?

Real-time movement is captured by onstage cameras and subsequently “trapped” inside the surface of the video screen. The dancers see their images in confinement while experiencing their bodies in relative freedom; yet, psychologically, each feels more attached to the projected image and its tight parameters than to the open space available. Surfacing poses the view that there is a choice to be made: identify with an image and you are captured and entrapped, experience yourself in the moment and you discover unquantifiable potential.

Four fictional characters selectively recreate their life experiences by returning to memories. Their stories and actions reveal the fallible and impermanent nature of human recall, where romanticized, repressed, lost, and recreated selves are the norm. Future of Memory posits that the process of how we store, recall, and embody the events of our lives defines who we are as individuals and, thereby, who we become as a community.

Winner: 2004 Time Out New York Dance Audience Award
Honorable Mention: Prix Ars Electronicia 2004

Reine Rien is an abstract, conceptual work inspired by the meditative aspects of the expansive flatlands and distant horizons of the American Midwest. The name comes from the juxtaposition of two French words that, literally translated, read as “Queen Nothing”, and was created using a method where the choreographer had no specific intention but instead trusted that through the artistic process, a subconscious knowledge would reveal itself.

This work takes its title and inspiration from an anonymous 17th Century alchemical manifesto. The tale is part spiritual allegory, part scientific discovery as we follow one man’s transformation to enlightenment. Christian Rosenkreutz exists in two time zones – one five hundred years in the past (1500 AD) and the other 50 years in the future (2050 AD). Both experience a “chemical wedding”: one transformed by the ancient, spiritually-rich technology of alchemy, the other through a secular, future technology of cybernetic reconstitution.

Reflections on the life of a 99 year old woman who made the jump from mind to body.

Searching for the corporeal within the virtual: a "tri-coastal" dance theater performance based on the book by the Critical Art Ensemble.

In Plane (1994)
Which is more powerful: the human dancer or her virtual dopplegänger. One of the early works combining dance & digital technology.

Red People (1994)
Inspired by the autobiography of autistic Donna Williams, our view of her view of the world.

Frame 313 (1992)
Evening length work based on the worst mass murder in U.S. history.

Tactile Diaries (1990)
A work about the ways we touch one another: emotionally, physically and virtually.

The Need (1989) in collaboration with Ilaan Egeland, Cathy Galeota, Betsy Herst, Sten Rudstrom & Peter Seidler