Escapes & Reversals is a performance for five dancers that looks at relationships between digital movement constructed for screens and exertion by live, gravity-bound bodies. The choreography is inspired by training drills, animals’ predator avoidance strategies, and the performers’ personal reflections about how and when they protect or make themselves socially available. These actions seem cartoon-like one moment, and utterly life-or-death, the next. The performance wrestles with behaviors and technologies that negotiate visibility and access in times of increasing surveillance, targeted advertising, drone warfare, and self-branding through social media, recognizing, in the midst of all of this, that human efforts to speak back to systems of power are nothing less than revolutionary. Made with and performed by Maddie Kodat, Joseph Kramer, Zach Nicol, Naoki Nakatani, Harlan Rosen and Christine Shallenberg, with support from the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography at Florida State University, High Concept Labs , the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, In>Time, and Pivot Arts.
