LIVE AT NATIONAL SAWDUST
December 2, 2023. 7:30 pm
December 3, 2023. 7:30 pm
Brooklyn-based Tiffany Mills Company and Ensemble Ipse join together to create three live music and dance-theater works featuring seven dancers and seven violists.
Brooklyn-based Tiffany Mills Company and Ensemble Ipse join together to create three live music and dance-theater works featuring seven dancers and seven violists. The rich sensory landscape of bodies, text, violas, and electronic sounds entwine to weave a fabric of questions: who are we when we are unseen? What role do we have in shaping how we are seen by others? And what meaning should we make from our waking visions? The program includes two pieces directed by Tiffany Mills: a “Poem from Exile,” composed by Stephanie Griffin and inspired by Ovid’s account of his wife’s agony when he was exiled to the remote regions of the Roman Empire (now Romania) and “Doa Persembunyian - A Prayer for Refuge,” composed by Tony Prabowo for choir, arranged by Griffin, based on a poem by Goenawan Mohamad about a woman’s suffering in civil war-torn Romania. The trilogy is completed by “Vapor/Blood,” composed by Max Giteck Duykers, dramaturgy by Peter Petralia, with choreography by Mills, in collaboration with the Tiffany Mills Company. This newest work interrogates the power of sight in its many literal and metaphorical manifestations. Text generated by the dancers and inspired by their movements are woven into a multisensory performance that invites the audience to consider what it means to be seen for who you really are. These texts interact with a physical language rooted in the company’s main influences—partnering, improvisation, and somatic modalities—all forms that contribute to self-exploration, human vulnerability, and individuality. Duykers’ score features seven violists who perform alongside pre-recorded sounds that are given life through triggering and processing in the space—thereby connecting music to text to movement. Dance artists for the evening include: Alex Biegelson, Tony Bordonaro, Ching-I Chang, Guanglei Hui, Tiffany Mills, Jordan Morley, and Emily Pope.
