Performance Work

Artists (Weena and Katie) statement:

Through the deep caverns carved by care, gut instinct, and unmapped movement—through the sheer will to not stop making moves—what emerges is tender, raw and exhausting. Hearts that keep unfolding. Relentless willingness to keep showing up, together.

We, Katie and Weena, tell our stories through choreography and song that is both set and improvised. Within our words, our bodies, our histories—there’s untamed humor and aching truth. For over a decade, we’ve been blending Authentic Movement, improvisational dance-making, dance crafting, friendship, and chosen family as a way to study what we really mean— when we engage in art, in culture, and in daily life.

Now, after a lifetime in the world of performance, theater, and dance—and after years inside both patriarchal and matriarchal systems—we’ve chosen to return to dance-theater on our own terms. Dance Theater- as the meeting place of language, bodies and theatrical choices. We’ve stepped out of hierarchical models to work more improvisationally, more wholly. And from that place, we now return to the structure of set form—not as a cage, but as a container for what needs to be said and moved.

We’re grappling with what it means to be alive in America in an uncertain future. For us, making dances and performing aren’t separate. Process and product are braided. The dances are us, and we are the dances—cosmic, glacial, boring, hilarious, barely-born and deeply wise.

We move with exactitude and also freedom. We work from a place of OK-ness, refusing self-inflicted misogyny. We practice generosity—toward ourselves, each other, the work, and the bodies we move with. We let our bodies be a testimony. We offer them as real, unhiding, and alive. We are here to expand, uplift, enliven and lay bare the hidden tremors and shakes of what it is to be alive in communion with ourselves and each other.