DanceHouse : Works-in-Progress Shared Program
Meghan Durham/Merge Dance, Megan Mazarick, and SCRAP Performance Group

Performance Dates:
Saturday January 27th at 9pm
Sunday January 28th at 7pm

SCRAP Performance Group
Three Sisters

Inspired by Audrey Niffenegger’s visual novel “Three Incestuous Sisters,” Three Sisters integrates Niffenegger’s interest in creating dance in relationship to visual art, literature, and multimedia performance. This work emerged from the complexity of Niffenegger’s images, and its choreographic ideas will set in motion the environments created in her drawings. Love, jealousy, joy, playfulness, and sorrow will dominate the scenes while the characters are observed by a “silent audience” that appears and disappears on stage to judge the action. The music score also will be created in response to images from Niffenegger’s Three Sisters and will be performed live. Three Sisters is an exploration of the relationship between images and actions, moving subjects and still objects, as well as what is illusive and what is real.

Meghan Durham/Merge Dance
Otherhood

Otherhood is an ensemble dance work choreographed by Meghan Durham/Merge Dance. The piece explores the idea of childlessness, and draws upon personal narrative, with social research of “motherhood/parenthood” as an institution in American society and history. It especially examines distinctions of biological parenting with adoption and childlessness, whether by choice or circumstance, probing questions of privacy, biological “privilege,” and preparedness. Otherhood employs movement/dance as the organizing framework to look at some of the implications, insights, social stigmas, and emotional journeys of adults without biological children. The body, as the biological instrument in human experience, serves as the site for this investigation through movement. The choreographic project incorporates text and imagery, and utilizes Maria Möller, a Philadelphia-based director, as a creative consultant and external eye to further shape the physical, visual, textual, and aural images. Michael Wall, a Philadelphia-based composer, created an original cylesongs/songbook score using interviews and personal narratives as source material for the score.

Megan Mazarick
Roadkill

In an exploration of American culture, two truck drivers find themselves on display as both swans and monsters in motion. A humorously dark portrayal of two men struggling to find their identity, the dancers are violent and sexual beasts, whirring and puttering motors, and two guys in trucker hats all in the same dance. In this duet, the men represent the most horrific stereotypes of masculinity and the cold monotony of mankind. Pedestrian actions quickly turn into Quasimodo-esque waltzes as dancers shift from “normal” into exaggerated states of being. The two men interact through guttural growling and shared gestures in a parody of primitivism. With softness in movement representing a retreat into vulnerability, the men unsuccessfully try to rid themselves of both vulnerability and beastliness. The shaking monotony of their occupation is the only constant variable. Eventually the men can only tune out conflicting desires to become truck engines.