DAUGHTER OF THE DEER
Fall 2018 Studio/LAB Residency
a collaboration between Stephen Christensen, Katrina Donaldson, Joya Scott, & Matthew Watkins
About the Artists
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Our work is about being in-between. As a collective, we exist and work between dance and theatre, live and digital, female and male, Latinx and white. With the 21st century gathering pace, it feels less and less like we can be just one thing or feel just one way.
Right now, we feel conflicted about what performance should do in the internet age. Should we dig in our heels and hold onto the past? Or should we let ourselves go and be swept away by the shallow, rushing current of digital life? We find ourselves wanting something else, something in between, a critical play between attraction and repulsion, embracing them both. Our work explores our most confused feelings, shameful impulses, deepest anxieties, and conflicted ideas. We want to be in a room, together, with life as it is: by turns cold, lonely, and distant, but also near and warm and tender.
Work Description
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This project is an original work of dance-theatre for solo performer, video, and sound, exploring the media construction of female identity and authenticity in the wake of #MeToo. We are thinking about who is trustworthy and which experiences are acceptable. About the distance between victim and perpetrator. About Asia Argento. About sanity, insanity, and being trapped between the two. About Medea and Andrea Yates, who drowned their children. About witch trials. We’re thinking about Christine Blasey Ford and Anita Hill, and who gets a fair shake. Building off the work done by documentary filmmaker, Trinh T. Minh-ha, to outline the aesthetic code of “objectivity,” our piece visually explores the subtle language that communicates who and what we’re supposed to believe. In the process, it uncovers the troubled relationship between art and journalism and questions whether either can ever really tell the truth.
Created by former members of Orange Theatre, the piece continues our exploration into developing a new performance style combining live theatre, dance, film, architecture, music, and sound into a hybrid of live and mediated experiences that challenge audiences to engage with complex issues of gender, sexuality, race, justice, story, and truth that define our contemporary world.
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