Wolfthicket

Press for 2021 Performance in Philadelphia: Broad St. Review | thinkingDance

Wolfthicket plays with the traditions, rituals, and fantasies of the 'girls games' we grew up with (or didn’t), and how they hop and skip across time and place.

The methods and materials of this dance come from the hand clapping games, recess activities, make-believe, and satires of intertwining US American folk traditions. The show is a modular set of improvisations that I have been developing since 2015, but a lot changed between the 2015 version and the 2021 version. In the 2021 version sampling, chorus refrains, accumulation, percussion, and call and response power the music, the dancing, the set, the world. An experiment in citing the omnipresence of Afro Diasporic influence on pop culture, the show includes a playbill turned bibliography.

The cast is approaching and leaving our thirties. The conventional dance theater world does not often positively embrace aging, both theoretically and materially. But for us, watching, healing, and helping each other as we age, lends the show maturity, humor, and perspective. What I did not predict at the start of the work, but has become braided into the show as life comes at us, is the relationship between performance and care-taking.

Wolfthicket is a mobile and modular in format, adaptable to various venues. It invites the audience to applaud, cheer, or heckle.

Wolfthicket has been performed in excerpt or in full:

August 2021 at Mertz Gall, Philadelphia, PA

Feb 2020 at the Table Gallery in Chicago, IL

June 2019 at Workinonit Deluxe, Performance Garage, Philadelphia, PA.

April 2019 at Dollop: Works in Progress, hosted by Subcircle, Philadelphia, PA.

The former version:

February 2016: Martial Posture, Philadelphia, PA (now Urban Movement Arts)

November 2015. Sarasota Contemporary Dance Company.

Past & present thicket performers: Amalia Colón-Nava , Johanna Kasimow, Maddie Hopfield, Kelsey Lanceta, Evelyn Langley, Chelsea Murphy, Lillian Ransijn, Dylan Smythe, Eva Steinmetz, Mary Carmen Webb, Elizabeth Weinstein as well as the members of the Sarasota Contemporary Dance Company.