Living Legacy Artist | August 31 - September 15, 2016
Undersweet/Transcendental Daughter
While at MANCC, Tere O’Connor focused on the development of two dance works. He worked on choreographing a new trio for seasoned dancers, titled Transcendental Daughter, which is intended to examine the spectrum between information overload and meditation. The trio sought to test the boundaries of how much information a body can cope with and process. This investigation is a metaphor for how much information a dance viewer can take in as they softly let go of any hopes for “comprehension” and begin to process information in a different way. O’Connor is drawn to such complexity as a key component of dance poetics and, interestingly, a key aspect of consciousness. Moreover, he worked to develop an embodied practice, moving towards meditation, that might soothe the audience and simultaneously look to absorb the complexity into that practice. He also further developed a duet titled Undersweet that originally premiered in 2015 at New York City’s American Realness Festival. Undersweet explores sexual repression and closeting, working from the supposition that formalism might result from repressed sexual desire. The work is a choreographic meditation on how this paradox finds expression in dance, or possibly even generates it.
While in residence, O’Connor met with Dr. Wen Li, an FSU Neuroscience faculty to explore internal motivations of movement, messaging in abstraction that has weight (less aggressive, slowness, silence) and how memory is housed in the body. O’Connor hosted a conversation with students about trends in choreography and offered a work-in-progress showing at the end of the residency.
Both the duet and trio were performed as part of the NY Quadrille curated by Lar Lubovitch at The Joyce Theater in NYC, October 4-9, 2016.
Collaborators in Residence: Natalie Green, Eleanor Hullihan, Michael Ingle, Silas Riener [performers]