Keates + Steeves

Our ongoing choreographic research is molded by and through 25 years of shared performance practice and collaborations in dancing, writing, and thinking. The pillars of our praxis have emerged through continued dyadic exchange: seeping, spilling, and surging into and around projects with many other artists over the years. Our research is currently (loosely) organized around the following principles:

  • Our research is shaped by the attention economy. We engage in slowness as an act of refusal. Contextualized within the slow moving catastrophe of the anthropocene, choreographies of body, breath, gaze, and that which is free softly resists ecologies of excess and the drive to waste.

  • Our aesthetics are degenerative: choreographies fall apart, wilt, become other, are cannibalized. No gesture, sound, impulse is thrown away, but upcycled into the sociality of choreographic communication.

  • Edging the sublime and the monstrous, our live choreography fetishizes thick beginnings and deep friendship as materiality. A choreographic sense of choice takes shape within social and biological matrices of each other. We rest on the pleasure and saturation of relating. 

  • We contextualize our movement in loops of listening, attunement, and “failed mirroring”- a method for molding intra-active (Barad) durational sculptures. Our practice of conversation without resolution is one of “staying with the trouble” (Haraway)

  • We are in a process with other people. Informed by the contemporary psychoanalytic dyad and its preoccupation with subjectivity, we engage verbal, visceral, and affective dialogues. Analysis is an action, and during improvisation, the action is performance.

  • Ours is a research of touch, and how touch moves through the moment to memory to be re-mobilized in touch again. We are always already an ensemble. The feelingful, ancestral, fungal, and bacterial entanglements we call by our own name are already multiple. The outside is already inside.

 

This is an excerpt from a 15 minute video interview conducted by
Tabalakera Art Center as part of the exhibition L’intrus (2018)

 

Further Listening:

This soundscape holds echoes of our choreographic writings and was generated by Joshua Dumas. Every listen is generated uniquely by compositional programming of a blender. This recording is from Tabakalera Cultural Center, 2018.

 

Keates and Steeves have made performances, taught workshops, given thousands of hours of body work, written texts, and conducted research into various philosophies of embodiment.

 

DAGES JUVELIER KEATES (she/they) is an artist working with and through the materiality of their body as a somatic space for holding paradox. Their works explore performative and poetic methodologies in researching internal cartographies of somatic, psychoanalytic, and nonhuman knowledges. Following a twenty five year performance career, Keates’ currently collaborates in transdisciplinary experimentation with Collier Schorr, Yingda Dong, and Alexis Steeves. Their work has been presented in Belgium, Germany, Spain, Sweden, and the USA. Since 2021, Keates has been engaged in dramaturgical dialogue with Faye Driscoll for Calving (Bremen, 2022) and Weathering (NYC, 2023). They have recently taught workshops at LUCA School of Arts (BE), PARSE Biennial Research Conference on Violence (SE), Williams College (USA), Paideia European Institute for Jewish Studies (SE), Campus PCS (PT), Ariana Reines’ Invisible College (USA), and The Royal Institute of Art (SE). Dages holds a BA in dance from Bard College, a transdisciplinary MA from NYU (2014), and an Advanced Masters from Sint Lucas Antwerpen (2022). They live and work between New York City and Stockholm, Sweden.

ALEXIS STEEVES is a dance artist based between New York City and Stockholm. Steeves pursues ongoing research in live solo and collaborative performance praxis. Her questions emerge from substrata of long-term, interdisciplinary dialogues and the relational ethics and emergent practices within which they co-create and sometimes rest. Most often these methods proliferate in shared studio practices, experimental performance and pedagogical formulations. Steeves’ is deeply informed by her exchange with Rosalind Crisp (AUS, EU), and work with the NYC based performance collective HAM (high art moment).Her work as a choreographer and teacher is nourished by 18 years as a licensed, therapeutic bodywork practitioner (LMT, SI). She earned an MFA in Choreography in the New Performative Practices program at the Stockholm University of the Arts as a scholarship recipient and holds a BA from Bard College (USA). Her artistic work has been presented in Estonia, Germany, Spain, Sweden, the USA and UK. She has taught contemporary dance, performance and composition at the Tallinn University (TLU), Fine5 Dance Theater, Noore Tantsu Festival (NoTaFe), Bard High School Early College and Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX). Since 2003 Steeves has worked as a licensed and certified massage therapist and, from 2013, specializes in Structural Integration (ATSI, manual fascial work of Ida Rolf).