left to their own devices is a triptych which rewires sound and movement, flipping the tropes of a dancer moving to music. These three pieces use installation, interactivity, and improvisation, through uncanny devices that rethink conventional sound/music partnering. Each piece—Hypnagogia, Barrel Roll, and Terpsitone—uses a small contraption that creates movement while also surveilling it. The music is generative, created on the spot by bespoke software and microelectronics. Parts of each piece have been presented at the Tanzhaus Zürich, The Brick Theater in NYC, and Bennington College.
These pieces are modular and configurable, inviting collaborators from solo performers to large groups, and adapt to installation in museums, stages, or alternative spaces. The suite of three pieces provides an evening-length show, or an exhibition adapted to the space at hand, and the technologies are compact and portable. Each piece creates its own metaphorical space, meditating on ideas ranging from aging to surveillance, from stasis to echolalia.
hypnagogia is a transitional state between sleep and wakefulness, in which people experience sleep paralysis, hallucinations, and uncontrolled tics. With hypnagogia, “sleep starts”, or bursts of energy through a limb, push one back into a waking state.
In this piece, electric muscle stimulants create involuntary movements in the dancer’s body during the performance, conveyed through wireless belts. These tics are unpredictable, generated by the sounds themselves, and are part of the improvisation—a borderline between intentional and unexpected, sleep and wakefulness. The sounds are generated on the spot, and alternating high and low tones are filtered and processed real-time to become echoes of each other. Initial collaborations have explored the tensions between stasis and sudden activity.
Parts of Hypnagogia were presented in process at the Brick Theater, Bennington College, and Tanzhaus Zürich. The work at Tanzhaus Zürich was done in collaboration with eminent choreographer Meret Schlegel. Hypnagogia has been staged in solo, duet, and trio, and the wireless belts are easily transportable. A future proposed version involves 8-12 dancers in a museum space.
A barrel roll is a plane nosediving on all axes, it’s a game of Russian Roulette. A music box rolls its barrel on a complete rotation of its only tune.
barrel roll is a self-contained device, made out of a yoga block, a music box, and a stepper motor. This device is given freely to choreographers to generate their own music. Playing with the topos of music box twirling a porcelain ballerina, the tiny mechanism is exploded out through contact mikes, stepper motors, and motion sensors to create a generative, interactive piece that transcends the toy. Inverting the trope, the dancer’s movement literally turns the barrel and creates the sound, which is processed and, in turn, gyrates the dancer and sound design. All the programming and generative sound is housed within the small mechanism.
The mechanism for Barrel Roll is complete, and will be premiered in Fall 2025. The piece works well as a solo performance; another proposed version is with 4 solo dancers, with the audience tuning into each tableau through wireless headphones.
Terpsitone unearths the story of a forgotten mechanism, and tries to reconstruct it, creating a meditation on absence and surveillance. The piece, for 1-6 dancers or participants, can be used in performance, audience interaction, or installation. In 1932, Leon Theremin adapted his eponymous instrument into a dance platform, for his newlywed partner, choreographer Lavinia Williams. An enormous metal plate, the so-called terpsitone was by all reports a crude sensor of movement. In 1936, he ported the mechanism up to Bennington College for a demonstration, but only 2 years later Theremin, and his device, vanished into thin air—by most accounts, kidnapped by the KGB. Only decades later, Theremin was discovered alive in Moscow, working clandestinely on devices such as The Thing, a KGB surveillance device housed in the Great Seal of America. All original copies of the Terpsitone were destroyed.
Terpsitone tries to reconstruct 4 of these plates, in their exact size and shape, but like the artist Sophie Calle, deals with their absence rather than exact physicality. Four shuttered windows of light act as sensors for either choreographers or participants, gathering information on gesture, movement, body structure and sound. The score is generative, based on bespoke software, but through delays, mapping, and displacement, conveys the sense of surveilled interactivity.