Caitlin H. Adams

W O R K S

A score is a score is a score (180 Minutes) – process title

Performance title – 1, 2, Infinite!

IN DEVELOPMENT

PHOTOGRAPHER, SHERIDAN TELFORD

CENTER FOR PERFORMANCE RESEARCH

180 Minutes is an umbrella-title for live performances developed from an improvisational process [for dancers and musicians] I have been creating over the course of a year in monthly sessions. The studio process is three hours during which a full work is developed, video-documented, and each session is transcribed to text.

I write scores to guide and direct dancers toward emergence. The order of scores solidifies over the course of each three hour session. Once set, the environment becomes a self-organized system – slowly unraveling – that emphasizes the individual amongst a group. Each participant drives the work, supports the group, and lives out their individual risks, fantasies, interactions and movement vocabularies. A score is a score is a score (180 Minutes) – my current process– synthesizes my ongoing interest in text-based improvisational score-making, durational ensemble movement, and a non-categorization or adherence to any particular aesthetic or medium. Yvonne Rainer’s Continuous Project Altered Daily is a kindred work, expanding my work’s context within the dance lineage I feel most related to.      

The performance is similar to a live set by a band – the scores are reordered and re-sequenced for a different audience experience every performance.

SUBLIMINAL TABLE (the daisy & the cactus)

The Daisy and The Cactus is a glossy, gluttonous reality. After two characters experience what seems to be an eternal picnic, they are left completely still —sitting on a floating table with nowhere to move, and nothing to eat. Rooted in excessive behaviors, The Daisy lives at the intersection of a compulsive list of references including Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation, Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor: a family chronicle, Ezra Keats’ The Snowy Day, the many editions of Irma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking, and 18th Century Versailles.

the heaping kind

The Heaping Kind, an official selection of the Berlin Indie Film Festival, is a 22min experimental film produced and created by Artistic Director & Choreographer, Caitlin Adams and Co-Director, Tariq Mitri. THK unfolds like a still life, following four characters amidst a hallowed apartment. Through visual storytelling, dance, and original music, THK architects an ethereal atmosphere existing within the tensions of our current reality.

Please email info@coheid.com to view. We look forward to sharing our work with you

Soundtrack available here: https://softk.bandcamp.com/album/the-heaping-kind

METALBODY

photos by Sheridan Telford

METALBODY, presented by Triskelion Arts in December 2019, is a dance-theater piece that transports audiences into a structure that questions, empowers, and reimagines democracy. Through varying methods of choreographic organization and movement patterns, viewers witness the four lead dancers become the superheroes of their organizational structure - they are leaders, supporters, rebels, ecstatic, tragic, and invincible. The choreography is sequenced with improvisational moments, gesture, falling, momentum, and nuanced classical vocabulary. The vocabulary is exaggerated, body percussive, repetitious, mathematical, and augments within the span of the work, establishing these characters as larger-than-life. METALBODY is centered around a quartet with one narrator. The narrator does not speak but through her body and point of view, she guides how we understand and witness the world MB inhabits and its inhabitants. The dancers/collaborators are Kristyn Arch, Maggie Beutner, Erin Bishop, Kelsey Greenway, and Tariq Mitri with sound and musical composition by Zack Vidal and Zach Crumrine.

SOFT & STARK

Commissioned by NYC Poetry Society & Milk Press

Choreographer & Director, Caitlin Adams

Dancers, Kristyn Archibald, Kelsey Greenway, Lir Katz

description, A site-specific piece made for NYC Poetry Festival on Governors Island. Three dancers live amidst tensions vacillating between familiarity and stillness to discomfort and dysphoria, reenforced by the bucolic setting of Governors Island, which, like all stylized colonial utopias, encourages amnesia about its violent past.

Displace Engine

Displace Engine was selected for Gibney Dance NYC Performance Opportunity Project (POP). It is the premier work of caitlinadams/HEIDCO.

DE centers itself around absences created by displacement and disassociation, elliptically addressing social issues, scientific and natural processes, and cultural identity, without reducing or literalizing those experiences. DE utilizes choreographic methods of repetition, instant composition, and variations on kinetic and structural themes; the movement both deconstructs and indulges in sentimentality by romanticizing physical vocabulary over time. 

The sonic environment creates distance between the product and the consumer (ie: the dance and the audience) by employing an aesthetic of "sexualized metal" – with music by electronic goth artist SOFIA RETA CORPORATION, and sound engineer, Zach Crumrine, styled by Helena Grierson of Libertine and FLOWERS.

This project includes research in Marxist philosophy of "commodity fetishism," capitalist ideology, and techniques of engineering and physics.   

The four fiscal quarters: An Opera

The Four Fiscal Quarters, A 60-minute opera includes a principal cast of four internationally performing opera singers and a dance ensemble of six, accompanied by a live orchestra. The story opens with a crisis in the form of a massive layoff and follows four C-Level officers as they struggle to hold their company together. Performed in the Los Angeles’ Pan Pacific Park’s flood control basin, and produced by Machine Project, the project received a portion of its funding from the National Endowment for the Arts "Imagine Your Parks" grant. (This was a large collaborative project; roles included: artistic direction, movement direction, casting direction, and choreographer.)  

good Mother

Good Mother studies the effects of disassociation on the individual as related to other bodies in space, attempting to answer questions surrounding the growth of disassociation within systems, structures, and processes.  With a depersonalized approach, the performers navigate a plane of existence through a taut, mechanical, classically informed vocabulary, framing the dancers as molecules originating from the same complex structure.  In chemistry, disassociation is reversible thus dancers are constantly teetering on physical alignment or unison. The work is centered around a duet originally crated with and performed by Erin Bishop O'Brien and Stephen Patterson, also features dancers Autumn Randolph and Charlotte Smith. Good Mother and Displace Engine are currently in process of re-adaptation as one dance theatre piece.         

BETWEEN THE CHAMBER, THE CAVITY, YOU, 

AND A RECEPTACLE FOR ONE MORE

A multimedia, interdisciplinary series featuring live and virtual performances from more than 20 participants with varied artistic backgrounds. This project is the result of collaborative, leaderless conversations pursued and processed privately between director and participating artists.  Performers share space only on nights of presentation.  As the series continues, more individuals will become involved, more bodies/lands/countries/states are represented.  This project aims to enhance local and global pluralism by magnifying immediate reality and giving total agency to everyone in the space. Through verbal, non verbal and unnamable language, the artists will process and provide lenses into their realities while in dialogue, collision and agreement with shared space and time. Central focus aims to distance the physical and mental body in order to illuminate the intersection of the private and public spheres of the individual. It explores the privacy of the body, striving to locate the language of our anatomical home.

PART 1: DYNASTY CENTER/OCT 2015

PART 2: EXIT OVERLAND/HIGHWAYS PERFORMANCE SPACE (Leo Garcia & Patrick Kennelly Present)

January 2016

PART 3: EVERYTHING CAN MAKE ME MAD RIGHT NOW, EVERYTHING/REDCAT STUDIO MARCH 2016

w/ BESTFRIENDS(Caitlin Adams + Chelsea Rector) 

Full Cast: Erin Bishop-O'brien, Joey Cannizzaro, Camila, Chelsea Conwright, Zach Crumrine, Ariana Daub, Eloise Deluca, Wesley Ensminger, Arne Gjelton, Becca Green, Helena Grierson, Tiara Jackson, Yvonne Lacombe
Pete Laughlin, Kelsey Lanceta, Ryan Masson, Elisabeth Mladenov, Tariq Mitri, Madison Page, Anna Luisa Petrisko, Chelsea Rector, Patrice Roth, Jordan Saenz