director’s note:

First and foremost, I’d like to thank my beautiful cast of performers for trusting this process. This has been the most “trust the process” process I’ve ever been in, and I am eternally grateful that Cambria, Robert, Ashley, Amanda, and Jesse were so willing to come along for the ride. If a choreographer had said to me, “here are ten rocks, we’re gonna be dancing with them so the plan is to start each rehearsal with thirty minutes of weightlifting and conditioning with them”, I would have been less than thrilled. And if that had been followed by, “now, write down a secret that you’ve never told anybody because we’re going to make a solo out of that material”, I would have almost certainly tapped out. But not these dancers!

I applied to this residency with a proposal to combine my anthropological work with dance performance. This has already been done, in various forms, by better anthropologists and choreographers. Still, I wanted to experiment with my own methods of ethnographic choreography, including traditional ethnographic methods like interviewing and archival research as well as more experimental means of translating data into movement and performance. Using the broad anthropological concept of “secrets”, I’ve staged the first of what I hope are many iterations of this project.

I invite you into our process and ask you to consider for yourself some of the questions we raised throughout the creation of this work: what does a secret feel like? Where do emotion and sensation meet? Are these separable? Is my secret an object? What happens when I write my secret down? How do I manage someone disclosing a secret to me? How do I navigate the balance between risk and trust, both in myself and in others? If I tell someone else, does the weight of this information halve? Does it double? What are the social functions of a secret, and what is my role in this social activity?

These are human questions, no less integral to an audience than to performers, as we interpret and imagine.

— SES