What I brought with me (2018)
two performers
what I brought with me is a detailed text score for two performers, written for the first performance of the PROMPTUS Collective, and premiered by myself with actor Emma Pfitzer-Price. The piece is ultimately a process of pop-culture as self-care, asking the performers to unearth and absolving inherited traumas through vulnerable performance. Each performer memorizes three songs: one from the year of their grandparents’ birth, one from the year of their parents’ birth, and one from the year of their own birth. They then perform these songs across from one another, in three rounds, each round the sound and movement language becoming more and more fragmented, until performers are nearly indistinguishable from one another. There are many possibilities as to how this process can play out in performance — the work could be interpreted immensely quiet, intensely dramatic, wildly funny, remarkably poignant. Or something else entirely. In this way I give space for performer agency in this vulnerable process.
Watch the piece here, performed by Fiona Robberson and Emma Pfitzer-Price.