images: Anna Hogg
point to touch, to touchpoint
fall low up lands, low fall lands up
you resemble the wall, you resemble the garden (2023)
point to touch… is a site-responsive, reconfigurable installation by the artist collective nonhumanities.
iteration 1: Ruffin Hall, University of Virginia (October 2023)
iteration 2: 1708 Gallery’s InLight Festival, Richmond VA (November 2023)
performers: Sara Burtner, Elena Dimitri, Nandhini Kathiravan, Maya Koehn-Wu, Meixin Yu, Paige Werman, Gabrielle Richardson, Katie Schetlick, and various members of the public
sound design: Adrian Wood
costume construction: Annie Temmink
nonhumanities is an art collective consisting of Conrad Cheung, Anna Hogg, and Katie Schetlick. nonhumanities works at the social and affective intersections of body, play, narrative, architecture, and interspecies living.
images: Tom Daly
OUT OF ME (2021)
Drawing from the myth of Eurydice, OUT OF ME asks, “In the timeless experiential underworld of performance how do we contend with the moment of the glance, the looking back of an audience?” How are we perceived, captured, read, categorized in the world? Historically as performers how have we been staged to appear? And how have we not yet been invited to be seen?
Presented at University of Virginia’s 2021 Fall Dance Concert
images: Alan Goffinski
solosolosolo (2019)
An interpretation of Rebecca Schneider’s essay “Solo Solo Solo”. The performance includes a live video feed and an altered version of Gertrude Stein’s “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso”.
Solos, presented by the Bridge PAI, is a quarterly series of radical interpretations and re-compositions; a platform to present solo work from a new perspective with accountability to the original.
Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative | September 14, 2019
images: Orfeas Skutelis
Come inside the air is light or how to embrace fictional realities (2018)
A cacophony of whispered screams, gasps, and cries, an infinite multitude of indeterminate beings diffracted through different spacetimes, the nothingness, is always already within us, or rather, it lives through us. We cannot shut it out, we cannot control it. We cannot block out the irrationality, the perversity, the madness we fear in the hopes of a more orderly world. But this does not mitigate our responsibility. On the contrary, it is what makes it possible. Indeterminacy is not a lack, a loss, but an affirmation, a celebration of the plentitude of nothingness.
– Karen Barad, On Touching—The Inhuman That Therefore I Am.
Performers: Kristin Clotfelter, Ellen Crooks, Katie Schetlick
Hollins University | June 29, 2018.
video: Tristan Brown
Future Projections: will/might (2018)
I don’t know anymore about the future than you do… – Ursula K. Le Guin
Sound and movement in concert with performative text speculate on the inhabiting of future(s) and the materializing of projection.
Performers: Jordan Perry and Katie Schetlick
Welcome Gallery | May 19, 2018
images: Jack Looney
the body is/isn’t extraordinary (2018)
the body is/isn’t extraordinary is a tribute to all of the church sanctuaries, (basements), and gymnasiums that made, and continue to make, space for the dancing body to gather, experiment, fall, run in circles, and find refuge in the extra-ordinary.
Presented at University of Virginia’s 2018 Fall Dance Concert in collaboration with Becky Brown and Heather Mease
image: Tom Daly
never blinded by the absence or overabundance, it lets in just enough (2017)
Focusing solely on the physical forces of push and pull, this work muscles through the possibility that dance is not about self-expression or “the body” but instead defined by the surrender of the self and the over-conceptualized body. Here, the dancers move their individual anatomies in an effort to resist concept.
Presented at University of Virginia’s 2017 Spring Dance Concert in collaboration with musician Jordan Perry.
images: Whitney Browne and Gui Caron
ONE NEO EON (2015)
A directionless incantation, ONE NEO EON, conjures infinitude inside a space built for regulated play.
Performers and collaborators: Peter Scarbo Frawley (poet) and Jordan Perry (musician) with Jason Mears, Zena Bibler, Julia Handschuh, Athena Kokoronis,Hannah Krafcik, Ben Van Buren, Lailye Weidman, Rishauna Zumberg
Fleet Moves Dance Festival | July 2015.
images: Jack Looney
More than (2015)
More than considers the interplay between affect and constructed space, both imaginary and real. The work moves through questions stirred up by the recent refugee crisis and the increasing construction of physical borders around the world. What barriers do we build around our own bodies as a result? To whom do we owe what? How far out do our hands reach?
University of Virginia’s Fall Dance Concert | December 2015
image: Tom Daly
faith enough to disbelieve (2015)
faith enough to disbelieve is a unique collaboration between Katie Schetlick and local musician Marie Landragin that draws parallels between the transformative powers of sacred practices and rock concerts. Arbitrarily derived gestures, both physical and sonic, find palpable meaning through faithful repetition and steadfast interpersonal relations. The final resulting gesture brings the felt, bodily experience of profundity into focus and questions the importance of our separate paths.
University of Virginia’s Spring Dance Concert | April 2015
images: Jennifer Lauren Smith
For Now (2015)
For Now is a site-specific, cross-disciplinary work in space, movement, and sound by Katie Schetlick, Rachel Devorah Trapp, and Jennifer Lauren Smith which attempts to find determined ways of being within an evolving environment.
Featured performers: Sérgio Andrade, Kristin Clotfelter, Hannah Krafcik, Rishauna Mari, and Zoe Rabinowitz
Sunset Park, Brooklyn | April 4, 2015
Duo For Many (2014)
Duo For Many is a meditation on the imperfections that arise when two divergent bodies attempt to find simultaneity. Seeming oppositions –repulsion and attraction, comfort and neglect, give and take, harmony and dissonance– collapse into a shared time and space whose complexity can only be understood by the two bodies that inhabit it. In the end, these gathered imperfections become the shared moment the duo never expected.
University of Virginia’s 2014 Fall Dance Concert and the 2015 American College Dance Association Mid-Atlantic Conference.
images: Matt Mazano
WoodEar (2014)
WoodEar is a video and sound installation designed by digital artist Peter Traub that uses sensors embedded in a tree to generate real-time content. Part of the installation includes a vertical projection on raw wood collaboratively designed and constructed by Katie Schetlick, Jennifer Lauren Smith and Peter Traub. The projection features a dancer “performing” a series of movements directed by the changing conditions of the tree throughout the day. Shot from above and crossfading over the course of 24 hours, the kinetic image, derived from chance sequencing of still shots, resembles our distant ancestors’ arboreal movement. Every variation in the tree’s air pressure results in a new configuration of a body in flux.
Performers: Zena Bibler, Ben Van Buren, Brad Stoller, and students of UVA’s Dance Program
images: Whitney Browne
HERE (2014)
Disparate landscapes sourced from natural phenomena experienced and documented by various artists during a week long residency in Wellfleet collide and result in a place and time that may only be described as HERE. Dancers and live musicians simultaneously navigate a condensed new world made up of their individual, intersecting cartographies.
Wellfleet Preservation Hall, Fleet Moves | July 2014
images: Emily White
The Plait (2014)
The Plait is an exploratory evening of music and dance–guitars, quick feet, electronics, hair, old samplers, investigative spines, amps, tapes, anatomical inscriptions, ears, you, seeing, compressing, shadowing, listening, reshaping, connecting. The quartet, dancers Kristin Clotfelter and Katie Schetlick and musicians Erik Deluca and Adam Smith, put together 2 sets based on simple progressions: pulses to ambient textures; loud to soft; slow to slower. The result– unexpected audio/visual configurations.
Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative and the Green Building in Brooklyn, NY | 2015
I’ll Dance While You’re Dancing and We Will Have Danced Together
I’ll Dance While You’re Dancing and We Will Have Danced Together, can best be summed up as a nonlinear game of (dance video) telephone. Using handheld technology, participating performers respond to each other’s movements across time and space. Each performer is instructed to create an instant composition in response to the particularities of their own location and subjective experience, filming resonant elements to share with other performers. As video accumulates, performers are invited to respond to the contributions of others, tracking the flow of inspiration and the manner in which ideas get taken up, transported, developed, and recycled.
…and We Will Have Danced Together was presented at the 2013 International Dance Theatres Festival in Lublin, Poland and adapted for the 2014 Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival in Cairo, Egypt. Presented in partnership with Culturehub, The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative, and Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival – Cairo.
images: Jen Cashwell
(–v–)^ (2013)
(–v–)^ was created through a unique collaboration with the Virginia Center for Computer Music, the University of Virginia Dance program and the McIntire Department of Music. Sampling sound through motion and motion back into sound, (–v–)^ postulates and distorts the dynamic relationship between the collective voice and artistic vision. (–v–)^ was developed by composer Erik Deluca, choreographer Katie Schetlick and members of the Movement Party.
TechnoSonics XIV: Motion concert at the University of Virginia | October 18, 2013
images: Whitney Browne
Landscape #6: …will set (2013)
Landscapes beckon our bodies to enter, to forge ahead and simultaneously urge us to step back, to realize perspective. In Landscape #6: …will set the moving bodies of the performers share time with the other elements that surround them. They disregard the inevitable as such; the disappearance of the sun behind the trees, the drying of their pond soaked clothes, the falling of the pine needles to the ground and instead place their physicality within the dynamic relationships of light, water, wood and sound.
Fleet Moves Dance Festival | July 2013
images: Tom Daly
Landscape #11: with circumstance (2013)
Using the preposition, an expression of spatial and temporal relations, as the impetus for movement and experimentation, Landscape #11: with circumstance ignites the potential of the stage space and invites viewers to do more than simply see. Live microphones lining the front of the stage amplify the lesser heard stories that we often share collectively and kinetically.
University of Virginia’s Spring Dance Concert | April 2013
Landscape #4: …will set (2013)
How might we refigure our perspectives so the inevitable doesn’t simply pass but rather remains a site for contemplation? Developed and constructed at the Ruins of Liberty Hall, Landscape #4:…will set removes, with the help of a Go Pro camera, the dancer’s body from the choreography and leaves the viewer with clips that set the crumbling structure back in motion.
Commissioned by Washington and Lee University’s Dance Department and presented at Lenfest Center for the Arts.