Statement
As a choreographer and director, I am interested in orchestration and amplification. If each medium involved in a project is one layer of reality, then my job is to tether them all together. In my work, I refuse to ignore anything. And I certainly refuse to believe that my reality is the only one at play.
I make work to understand the rhizomatic world as pluralistic at every moment. Even if I am sitting alone in a set, stage, gallery, et cetera, there are still conversations happening within the environment. The plants, the furniture, the history of the place itself, the amount of time I have spent there in comparison to the fresh eyes that will be entering are coalescing constantly. There are the artists journeying to the place we will all work together, and the conversations they are having individually in their minds. I have crafted a structure that is porous, vacillating within the crevasses of action, reaction, acknowledgment, and acceptance. This scaffolding frame the body of artists, like a home, encapsulating layers of reality, fantasy, and everything in between.
My goal is to listen at every moment and speak while listening. My goal is to take care and remember that art making can be a void of missed opportunities — the world I have built is structured to never miss those opportunities.
I aspire to be one very large eye, holding a cohesive vision that crystalizes the parts to work independently. The truth is the role of direction is shared, and varies in everyone — I look to work with artists guided toward unpacking their personal directional abilities.
This gestalt is not an absolute but the result of nurturing every physical, metaphysical, and mental body.
I hold myself and all parts of myself accountable constantly as a director. And I ask my collaborators to do the same thing. I am excited to be challenged in ways I could never expect. I am surrounded by commitment to something greater, and larger than life. There is a hive intelligence that is possible in any work, and I am energized by the path there. The result of these high standards is palpable, penetrable, and precise.
My studio process initiates the birthing of a collective memory. The moment I begin a work is the moment a new body is developing, and this body has memory, bones, fluids, a life to accomplish, and a map to locate.
If I am aiming to create vast landscapes with candor from a multiplicity of personal experiences where everyone is visible, then I must be challenged to be quiet, to be loud, to negotiate, and mediate. I take my role in direction with solitude, seriousness, and jubilee. On the topic of peace, I am sensitive to my being a vessel generating a topographic body sculpting in collectivity.”
BIO
Originating from classical and contemporary dance, Caitlin Adams is a choreographer, director, producer, and audio-visual artist. She holds a BFA in Dance Performance, Choreography, and Creative Writing from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). Her work has been presented at Gibney Dance NYC, Triskelion Arts, Prospect 4/New Orleans Art Biennale, NY Art Book Fair/Printed Matter, NYC Poetry Festival, Highways Performance Space, REDCAT, Human Resources LA, Bates Dance Festival, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Before relocating to NYC, Adams organized Dynasty Center (2015-2017), a community space, rehearsal studio, and DIY music venue in Downtown Los Angeles' Chinatown. Then from 2018-2021, Caitlin launched her socially-equitable and collaborative NYC-based dance company, HEIDCO that specifically worked to democratize studio-practice. HEIDCO (now Caitlin Adams Studio) is a fiscally sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization.
In June 2020, Adams was featured in an interview with BOMB Magazine (Intuition is Bodily: Caitlin Adams Interviewed). Reviews of her work have also been seen in Dance Informa, Dance Enthusiast, NPR and LA Dance Chronicle.
As a choreographer & director, Adams has collaborated with theater directors, filmmakers, classical and electronic composers, opera singers, pop musicians, and visual artists. Her choreographic direction was presented at Documenta15 in Kassel, GE in a film titled, Nestling in Rapid Floods by artist Vidischa-FADESCHA, founder of Party Office Collective.
Adams is a creative producer and director with PERFORMA, under the curatorial vision of RoseLee Goldberg where she has worked with Haegue Yang, Jacolby Satterwhite, Kevin Beasley, Madeline Hollander, Omer Fast, Nora Turato, and Franz Erhard Walther.
Other notable producing credits: VOGUEWORLD (Condé Nast & Bureau Betak), Minor Theater’s Marie It’s Time (HERE Arts), Normandy Sherwood’s Psychic Self Defense (HERE Arts), Hivewild’s dance film A Sigh of Origin, Rao’s Homemade Sauce ‘The Saucery Chicago’ (Dera Lee Productions)
Other notable talent/stage management credits: Michael Kors (NYFW), Tory Burch (NYFW), Pace Gallery (Gala honoring Nina Simone House 2023), Performa Gala 2022, Beach Sessions (Trisha Brown 2022 & Merce Cunningham 2023)
As a dancer/performer, she has worked with Colin Connor, Daniel Charon, Kate Wallich, Zoe Scofield, Meryl Murman, Denise Leitner, Maya Caroll,and film directors, Lior Shamriz, and Asher Hartman.
Adams has taught dancers of all ages. She was resident choreographer and movement director of Silverlake Children's Theater Group from 2015-17 and has taught in the NY public school system with organizations, Together in Dance and Wingspan Arts. Other teaching credits: Dancewave, Gibney Dance, MoreFish Open Studios
Her book, Trying Poems was published in 2017 with the support of Pomona College and LA’s former, Machine Project. It’s small print of 103 copies has been sold at Printed Matter, NY Art Book Fair, and various small bookstores in NYC.
Adams also works as a consulting professional astrologer, which is whole other bio.
She is currently based in Brooklyn, NY.
