other stories
other stories is a layered multimedia performance that triggers memory, emotion and heightened awareness through deeply personal and evocative movement.
A collection of interwoven movement events that highlight the friction between stories, other stories attempts to unearth our memory of our lives through a physical process. If we are all a compilation of stories about our selves, our country, our friends, lovers, parents, children, teachers, what happens when we are confronted, particularly within an intimate relationship, with a story that diverges from ours, how do we deal with that friction against our reality? Further, what does it mean to believe that there is no one reality, but to give our selves over wholly to our stories? What happens to our relationships when our stories change?
“other stories expands Beller’s interest in the power of the personal — history, physicality, experience — and how it can affect movement. The individual stories/dances are evocative and moving.”
The structure includes a high stakes event, which reveals the creative process in real time onstage. A guest artist performs at every show with no prior rehearsal or knowledge of the work. They improvise onstage about a story of their choosing. The Company dancers catch material from the guest and feed it back to them in short bits throughout the work, inviting them back onstage at the end to perform a story of a story of a story.
This event illuminates the fragility of “reality” and allows us to see the building and unraveling of our constructions, both physical and narrative.
Photos by Steven Schreiber