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U.S. PREMIERE

With the participation of members of the Georgetown University Chamber Singers Ensemble, Frederick Binkholder, Artistic Director

“There’s a terrible monotony in chaos. As we sit, wide awake and transfixed, trapped in a terrifying stop-motion time-lapse, a white noise trembles underneath our still lives; humming, burning and screaming behind the mask of sophistication that has become modern social interaction.”

Still Life translates into French as Nature Morte—dead nature. Butoh is often described as living death, brought forward by distress. A state of dying, still alive: a suspension of grotesque dilapidation. What better image to describe our time? Nature is dying, and all the while we’re rendered immobile, stuck in our still lives—living, but dying. Through the windows of our little chambers, we watch forest fires and torrential floods tear away at the landscape—we stare life in the face—transfixed by the constant echo of our desires, what we think we want— predicted for us, on the basis of our fractured selves, millions of data-points rehashed and sold back to us as advertisements for lives we wished we were living: Connected, disconnected.

Still Life is a dance creation for two incredible performers who both have ventured far beyond contemporary dance in search for new physical expressions—together they share experience from working with Kabuki, Butoh, contemporary theater, film, and television.

Still Life is a work that innately deals with nature—within and without—exploring how we can mend our relationship with ourselves and, in turn, each other and the living world around us.

“We often forget that we are nature. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we’ve lost our connection to ourselves.”
—Andy Goldsworthy