My new work in a quiet time resides in a duologue relationship with Karen Kaufman. We summon our history of both choral singing together and class dancing to go towards how non-talking harmonizing can create intimacy in conversational motion. This film is both an imprint of our talks about age, memory, and identity and a re-coding of how we are converging. 

In this pandemic, my grief and fear have brought the edge of life’s end into focus. Karen and I are asking from this place, what is to be in the now? What forgotten and recognized memories buoy the present? What does it mean to approach oneself as a future ancestor? Now that we are here, and our audience is in the room, something enormous has shifted. 

To develop the setting for this work, I was aware that considerable numbers of new dance works have been developed and filmed in the home. Here I thought I would diverge from this pattern. I was drawn to a place where we might be most comfortable risk-taking and went toward where Karen feels at home in her moving body so as to consider more fully what of what she shares with me is for listeners beyond our space in time, and what remains between us. We landed at home. 

Towards the end of the work, I ask Karen about dancing. I have been asked too many times what I will do when I “can no longer dance” and have become more attuned to disabled artists and elders in dance who overwhelm this question with the fact of dancing. In process, my own question was followed by talking back and forth about partner social dances, heteronormative movement, gender in motion, and dance spaces made for us and spaces of less comfort. In this work I invoke camera/collaborator-as-dance-partner and we call in the spectral presence of those conversations. We are still with the materials of our gathering process.

To watch in a quiet time https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/554524830 please email for the password.