as though your body were right
Jonathan Meyer
This work is an invitation to confront the bodiliness of being human. It is a shared experience of the vulnerability of being a body, and of the power of being a body. It is a peeling back of one aspect of being human, the social skin that guards and protects all that is contained therein; the child, the infant, the animal, the organic mass, the incomprehensibly vast community of cells. It is a query to the wisdom of the cells, to offer some gleam of how to be one among many in a system that is vaster, more powerful, and more merciless that we can comprehend.
How does the cellular speak to the super-organismic? Can we love what is thoroughly and simultaneously our power and our vulnerability? Can we be just bodies together? Powerful and vulnerable, naked of the social? If we could, what would we gain thereby?
The development of this project was driven by these ideas and questions. Research was exploring what it would mean to choreograph the cells’ movement rather than the body’s; it was reading, thinking, and writing about personal and systemic traumas; it was grappling with how these two areas of inquiry relate.
An audience of four
A micro-theater
The cells of the body murmurate like starlings
A puppet emerges from an egg
That emerges from a mouth
Exploring the landscape of the body
That it calls home
Artists on the second iteration of the project:
Jonathan Meyer – direction, choreography, set design & construction, lighting design, dance performance
Enid Smith – dance performance
Hanna Swartz – dance performance
Grace Needleman – puppetry performance
Max Pope – puppetry performance
Tom Lee – puppetry design, creation, upkeep, and puppetry training
Joe St.Charles – music & sound composition, in collaboration with Kevin Spafford
Additional artists who have contributed to the project &/or performed in previous iterations:
Sara Zalek – dance performance
Arden Lapin – puppetry performance & repetiteur
Amanda Maraist– dance performance
Margo O’Connell – puppetry performance
Lauren Kunath – puppetry performance development
as though your body were right is one half of VICINITY DIPTYCH, and developed in tandem with Julia Antonick’s project Tend. These pieces were conceived as a performance diptych able to be experienced independently or as a double feature. The first iteration performance of these works was presented in fall of 2022.
Both works intend to significantly challenge the audience and simultaneously practice radical care for each attendee, inviting people into a safer space to delve into inherently uncomfortable but rewarding material.
Photography – Ian Vecchiotti
Pictured – Jonathan Meyer, Amanda Maraist
Puppets created by Tom Lee
To find scheduled events visit our calendar.
as though your body were right at Make Do
