Choreography

Leslie Satin writes: My choreography is best reflected in the title of a piece I made in 2016, Things Hanging in the Air. These words are borrowed from anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, whose writing conveys the sense of affect, of feelings, of knowing in a place and time: a day or a year or a fleeting moment. Making a dance, watching a dance, dancing, we experience movements that evolve or repeat or disappear, irrevocably changing the little world, the space and place, of the performance. As a choreographer, I am drawn to embodied ideas and experiences of space and place as they intersect with movement and stillness, with histories, memories, and imaginings which somehow—no matter how complex or fixed the dance’s compositional score or the performers’ particularity—produce or permit something unexpected to take place in performance. I am moved in dance and in everyday life by the entwinement of the planned and the improvisational, and I work in that direction in my dance-making.