EDGE OF AQUARIUS (2024)
Alexandria Nunweiler
Photos by Liam Kean / @runawaycamera
Edge of Aquarius, imagined by Alexandria Nunweiler with The Click, is both a “self-defining and self-defying work” as it tracks Nunweiler’s January 17th birthday, dangling on the edge of the Aquarius sign. This evening-length contemporary dance theater work features a multigenerational, multicultural cast that depicts a nonlinear coming of age story through the guise of a birthday party.
Experiencing time as a circle, the work acknowledges the loud and quiet acts of aging. Through collaborative processes with both the cast and identified members of the greater Boston community, the piece tells true true stories of growing up, growing old, and growing into oneself through depictions of traditional American party scenes. These include the awkwardness of a girl learning to use her first tampon, the surprising humor of a patient receiving his first colonoscopy, and more. There are unspoken struggles, too, as a married couple dances their experiences of trying to start a family, the simultaneous comfort and pressure one feels from a parent or a child, and the exploration of celebrating birthdays of loved ones who have passed. While balancing joy and anxiety, universal experiences are presented through specific and personal storytelling ultimately inviting the audience to feel, alongside the performers, the full weight of what it is to be human.
Premiere: January 19-21, 2024 | The Foundry, Cambridge, MA
Other Performances:
Work in progress showing, May 2023 in Click | The Dance Complex, Cambridge, MA
Edge of Aquarius is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the New England Dance Fund through the New England Foundation for the Arts, The Dance Complex's BLOOM Residency, Boston Moving Arts Productions and The Click. Other support comes from The Farmland in Wakefield, MA for providing cakes for showings, performances, and workshops associated with the project.
Read More: 'Dancing Through Milestones: Alexandria Nunweiler's Edge of Aquarius' by Kathryn Boland, Dance Informa
Experiencing time as a circle, the work acknowledges the loud and quiet acts of aging. Through collaborative processes with both the cast and identified members of the greater Boston community, the piece tells true true stories of growing up, growing old, and growing into oneself through depictions of traditional American party scenes. These include the awkwardness of a girl learning to use her first tampon, the surprising humor of a patient receiving his first colonoscopy, and more. There are unspoken struggles, too, as a married couple dances their experiences of trying to start a family, the simultaneous comfort and pressure one feels from a parent or a child, and the exploration of celebrating birthdays of loved ones who have passed. While balancing joy and anxiety, universal experiences are presented through specific and personal storytelling ultimately inviting the audience to feel, alongside the performers, the full weight of what it is to be human.
Premiere: January 19-21, 2024 | The Foundry, Cambridge, MA
Other Performances:
Work in progress showing, May 2023 in Click | The Dance Complex, Cambridge, MA
Edge of Aquarius is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the New England Dance Fund through the New England Foundation for the Arts, The Dance Complex's BLOOM Residency, Boston Moving Arts Productions and The Click. Other support comes from The Farmland in Wakefield, MA for providing cakes for showings, performances, and workshops associated with the project.
Read More: 'Dancing Through Milestones: Alexandria Nunweiler's Edge of Aquarius' by Kathryn Boland, Dance Informa
| Download the Premiere Program |
MY GUIDE TO FEELING IT ALL (2023)
Angelina Benitez
Photos by Nicole Marie Photography / @nicole.mari.photography
my guide to feeling it all is an intricate movement tapestry portraying the wide range of human emotion imagined by Angelina Benitez, created and performed with Benitez and dancers Katrina Conte and Alexandria Nunweiler. Through this contemporary dance work, the performers seek to identify, portray, and celebrate the full range of human emotion - from the sad to the angry to the joyful and everything in between - embodying the contradictions that make up the human experience including the intersection of shame and pride, love and grief, anxiety and excitement. As a queer latinx artist, Benitez weaves themes of identity and self-acceptance into the narrative. She includes deeply personal elements of her own journey of "straight" allyship, monogamy, breakups, and polyamory. The work celebrates the beauty of authenticity and strength in vulnerability. Benitez invites viewers to embrace their own identities and express their emotions without fear or judgment, while challenging the societal norms that often encourage us to suppress or compartmentalize our feelings. Original recorded music by Adam Matthew, a singer-songwriter working with vocals, acoustic and electric guitar, supports the atmosphere of emotionality and empathy with Adam’s heartfelt and accessible indie-folk style.
Premiere: November 18, 2023 | MAGMA Gloucester, MA
Other Performances:
Work in progress showing, May 2023 in Click | The Dance Complex, Cambridge, MA
my guide to feeling it all (excerpt) in Roots & Routes, December 9-10, 2023 | The Dance Complex, Cambridge, MA
my guide to feeling it all (excerpt) featured in Salem Arts Festival June 8, 2024 | Old Town Hall, Salem, MA
Informal Presentation, December 1, 2024 | Human Movement Lab, Hyde Park, MA
Premiere: November 18, 2023 | MAGMA Gloucester, MA
Other Performances:
Work in progress showing, May 2023 in Click | The Dance Complex, Cambridge, MA
my guide to feeling it all (excerpt) in Roots & Routes, December 9-10, 2023 | The Dance Complex, Cambridge, MA
my guide to feeling it all (excerpt) featured in Salem Arts Festival June 8, 2024 | Old Town Hall, Salem, MA
Informal Presentation, December 1, 2024 | Human Movement Lab, Hyde Park, MA
| Download the Premiere Program |
EMOTIVE LAND (2022)
Lonnie Stanton
Emotive Land is an Augmented Reality dance installation accessible via a free smartphone app. This site specific performance project allows audience members/users to watch dances on their smartphones at sites along the Charles River. The arrangement of short dance vignettes center nature's resilience, and encourage all to consider a relationship to land, rooted in stewardship versus hierarchical ownership.
Created as a site responsive installation captured on film and translated through technology, this project invites harmony between nature, society and innovation. As people walk the Charles with whatever perceptions and feelings they have at that moment, moments of movement displayed through our interactive augmented reality app will interrupt their internal dialogue and bring them to an alternate vision of what they normally see. Through this interruption, they can perceive the dynamic dance that constantly exists between themselves and their environment.
The physical constraints of our public spaces shape the art of human expression and growth in a similar relationship as the habitat of Nature’s organisms shapes Nature’s art. Therefore, the stairwell, hallway or bench are the constraints that enable the art of that space to manifest. The passerby of site-specific work exhibits an intriguing autonomy. Audience members are free to come and go at any time, making their attention, however brief, the most profound acceptance of art itself.
Choreographer/curator Lonnie Stanton hopes to place human expression outside in a way that has no hierarchy: the tree and the squirrel are of no less value than the human in process. How do we frame and highlight the plants and wild animals that are left in cities? How do we not assume authority over nature, especially in an urban landscape?
Premiere: October 1, 2022, Canal Way, Cambridge, MA
Augmented reality app launched October 1 and run through November 30, 2022.
Other Performances:
Emotive Land, The Preview, September 23, 2022 | Blessing of the Bay Boathouse, Somerville, MA
Emotive Land (dance on film excerpt) in Click May 2023 | The Dance Complex, Cambridge, MA
Emotive Land is made possible in part by grants and residencies received from: Boston Moving Arts Productions, The Dance Complex BLOOM Residency Program, a Somerville Arts Council ArtAssembled Residency Fellowship, the New England Foundation for the Arts’ New England Dance Fund, with generous support from the Aliad Fund at the Boston Foundation, and the Live Arts Boston grant from the Boston Foundation. Additional resources and support provided to The Click by BioMed Realty and MIT Open Space Programming.
Read More:
'Emotive Land' brings dance to the Charles River through augmented reality by Joy Ashford, Boston Globe
Augmented reality and the arts merge in Cambridge dance performance by Celina Colby, The Bay State Banner
The Click's "Emotive Land": Experience Dance Through Augmented Reality by Emma H. Lu, The Harvard Crimson
Emotive Land by The Click Offers an Augmented-Reality Dance Experience by Dance Informa
Created as a site responsive installation captured on film and translated through technology, this project invites harmony between nature, society and innovation. As people walk the Charles with whatever perceptions and feelings they have at that moment, moments of movement displayed through our interactive augmented reality app will interrupt their internal dialogue and bring them to an alternate vision of what they normally see. Through this interruption, they can perceive the dynamic dance that constantly exists between themselves and their environment.
The physical constraints of our public spaces shape the art of human expression and growth in a similar relationship as the habitat of Nature’s organisms shapes Nature’s art. Therefore, the stairwell, hallway or bench are the constraints that enable the art of that space to manifest. The passerby of site-specific work exhibits an intriguing autonomy. Audience members are free to come and go at any time, making their attention, however brief, the most profound acceptance of art itself.
Choreographer/curator Lonnie Stanton hopes to place human expression outside in a way that has no hierarchy: the tree and the squirrel are of no less value than the human in process. How do we frame and highlight the plants and wild animals that are left in cities? How do we not assume authority over nature, especially in an urban landscape?
Premiere: October 1, 2022, Canal Way, Cambridge, MA
Augmented reality app launched October 1 and run through November 30, 2022.
Other Performances:
Emotive Land, The Preview, September 23, 2022 | Blessing of the Bay Boathouse, Somerville, MA
Emotive Land (dance on film excerpt) in Click May 2023 | The Dance Complex, Cambridge, MA
Emotive Land is made possible in part by grants and residencies received from: Boston Moving Arts Productions, The Dance Complex BLOOM Residency Program, a Somerville Arts Council ArtAssembled Residency Fellowship, the New England Foundation for the Arts’ New England Dance Fund, with generous support from the Aliad Fund at the Boston Foundation, and the Live Arts Boston grant from the Boston Foundation. Additional resources and support provided to The Click by BioMed Realty and MIT Open Space Programming.
Read More:
'Emotive Land' brings dance to the Charles River through augmented reality by Joy Ashford, Boston Globe
Augmented reality and the arts merge in Cambridge dance performance by Celina Colby, The Bay State Banner
The Click's "Emotive Land": Experience Dance Through Augmented Reality by Emma H. Lu, The Harvard Crimson
Emotive Land by The Click Offers an Augmented-Reality Dance Experience by Dance Informa
MAKE LIGHT: OR HOW I SURVIVED IT ALL (2022)
Kristin Wagner
Make Light: or how I survived it all (formerly Survival Aesthetics) is a reflection on seemingly meaningless beauty. Pulling from lesser known Darwinian theories of evolution - that argue aesthetics as inherent to survival - movement vocabulary, ranging from tender and subtle to luscious and sweeping, offers expressions of joy whose meaning exists only in the beauty of its presentation.
The common belief of Darwinian Evolutionary Theory is that the reason for the existence of a particular trait or behavior is strictly for survival. However, Darwin once remarked that “stripes and marks and ornamental appendages have all been indirectly gained through the influence of love” - raising the theory that evolution may be expressed as an appreciation of the beautiful, through the exertion of a choice.
We need only look at the elaborate courtship rituals of many of Earth's species to see this theory in action: fish who attract with colorful scales, whales that woo through song, birds that charm through dance. Each of these "performances" sustains the species due to the simple fact of beauty being both displayed and appreciated. In this way, there is no such thing as meaningless beauty. Something can be meaningful simply for the fact that it is beautiful.
Inspired in part by both physical and metaphorical windows into human existence, the choreography extends beyond Darwin's pondering and considers how witnessing beauty and experiencing joy ensure our resilience as a species during periods of great challenge.
make Light: or how I survived it all is made possible in part by grants and residencies received from: Boston Moving Arts Productions, The Dance Complex BLOOM Residency Program, the New England Foundation for the Arts’ New England Dance Fund, with generous support from the Aliad Fund at the Boston Foundation, and the Boston Opportunity Fund, administered by the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture and the City of Boston. Additional resources and support provided to The Click by The Cambridge Foundry.
Premiere: in Refract/Reframe: An Evening of Love, Loss, and Light, December 2-4, 2022 | The Foundry, Cambridge, MA
Other Performances:
Survival Aesthetics in DanceNOW Boston, February 2022 | The Dance Complex, Cambridge MA
Survival Aesthetics in CURE8 Cambridge, May 2022 | The Dance Complex @ Canal, Cambridge, MA
The common belief of Darwinian Evolutionary Theory is that the reason for the existence of a particular trait or behavior is strictly for survival. However, Darwin once remarked that “stripes and marks and ornamental appendages have all been indirectly gained through the influence of love” - raising the theory that evolution may be expressed as an appreciation of the beautiful, through the exertion of a choice.
We need only look at the elaborate courtship rituals of many of Earth's species to see this theory in action: fish who attract with colorful scales, whales that woo through song, birds that charm through dance. Each of these "performances" sustains the species due to the simple fact of beauty being both displayed and appreciated. In this way, there is no such thing as meaningless beauty. Something can be meaningful simply for the fact that it is beautiful.
Inspired in part by both physical and metaphorical windows into human existence, the choreography extends beyond Darwin's pondering and considers how witnessing beauty and experiencing joy ensure our resilience as a species during periods of great challenge.
make Light: or how I survived it all is made possible in part by grants and residencies received from: Boston Moving Arts Productions, The Dance Complex BLOOM Residency Program, the New England Foundation for the Arts’ New England Dance Fund, with generous support from the Aliad Fund at the Boston Foundation, and the Boston Opportunity Fund, administered by the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture and the City of Boston. Additional resources and support provided to The Click by The Cambridge Foundry.
Premiere: in Refract/Reframe: An Evening of Love, Loss, and Light, December 2-4, 2022 | The Foundry, Cambridge, MA
Other Performances:
Survival Aesthetics in DanceNOW Boston, February 2022 | The Dance Complex, Cambridge MA
Survival Aesthetics in CURE8 Cambridge, May 2022 | The Dance Complex @ Canal, Cambridge, MA
| Refract/Reframe Program.pdf |