Event Details - EX NIHILO: Out of Nothing

Ex Nihilo

Working with texts such as Brian Swimme’s “The Universe Is A Green Dragon,” along with texts by Alan Lightman, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Rebecca Solnit on cosmological physics, poetry and beingness, this work incorporates lusciously sequential movement vocabulary and everyday gestures into an earnest contemplation of our place in the story of the universe while asking specific questions about presence, reality, and wonder. The source material for this cosmological dance theater work is a series of seven short ensemble, duet & solo works created by joyproject and collaborators over the past 4 years. These pieces are reworked and deepened for the creation of this new evening length project. The theme grapples with the phenomenon of life as flux, as perpetually changing and staying the same, through the lenses of far reaching cosmic phenomena & personal experience of time. Although each work is distinct, these recurring and driving conceptual themes of transformation create a narrative arc, much like the hero’s journey.

ABOUT joyproject

joyproject is a collaborative platform for creating contemplative performance experiences at the threshold of dance, theater, comedy and installation. Artistic Director, Joy Davis, invites audiences and performers alike to contemplate humanity, enjoy absurdity, and delight in verbal and physical articulation. Working with juxtaposing elements such as humor with grief, wildness with silence, beauty with ferocity, and science with poetry, joyproject uses storytelling, character development, and current events to develop narrative scenes that are episodic, often nonlinear, and evoke imaginative (sometimes literal) journeys. Dancers morph between situations such as lonely crying, counseling the audience “just let it all wash over you,” and barking while attempting pilates exercises. Dancers in fur coats rapidly catalogue quotidian gestures amidst overwhelming facts about physics; women poised in ball gowns are reduced to slithering underneath theater curtains; old junk is repurposed into sculpture and named the archive of the future. The balance of dream logic and realism create surprising possibilities onstage which transcend the singularity of each discipline we work with. Joy’s creative practice is steeped in Countertechnique, improvisation, and performance; and typically begins with Countertechnique class followed by improvisational tasks, asking questions and using text to generate situations or states-of-being, and developing choreography that is lusciously sequential, gesturally nuanced, and moves through space with momentum.