Performance Works (Selected)
Alexa Echoes, 2021
Alexa Echoes is a film in the mode of a chamber opera by visual artist Amanda Turner Pohan in collaboration with composer Charlie Looker, choreographer Dages Juvelier Keates and performer Katy Pinke. The first iteration in a series of three performances, Alexa Echoes recasts the relationship between cultural movements and commercial technologies through the history of women’s devocalization and disembodiment. It begins with mythical Greek figures, such as Echo, and leads up to Amazon’s smart speaker and digital voice-based assistant, Alexa.
In this film, EMPAC is concurrently the site of production, setting, and subject that surrounds three manifestations of the voice: candid, staged, and disembodied. As in much of Pohan’s interdisciplinary oeuvre, the film looks at the body’s complicated relationship to technology as it relates to autonomy, animation, and the melismatic sound of breath. Alexa Echoes incorporates movement, speech, and an orchestral score to abstract the gendered decisions that frame new media technologies, gesturing to the corporate entities which choreographed them.
The film will be released on EMPAC’s website on Thursday, February 4 at 5PM (EST) followed by a conversation between Amanda Turner Pohan and curator Marisa Espe. This project is accompanied by a text version of the project’s script.
Alexa Echoes is organized by Muheb Esmat, Marisa Espe, Bergen Hendrickson, Ciena Leshley, Ana Lopes, Liz Lorenz, Brooke Nicolas, Elizaveta Shneyderman, and Rachel Vera Steinberg from Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies class of 2020, working with EMPAC curator Vic Brooks.
amplify the nothing, 2020
E/D is the collaborative alter-ego of artists Erin Cairns Cella and Dages Juvelier Keates. Approaching themselves as “performance clay,” their practice investigates liminality on somatic, cognitive, and imagistic levels. Their work has been presented through Triskelion Arts Split Bill Festival, Triskelion Arts Presents, Temple University, Marble House Project’s Art-Seed, Northside Festival, Women in Motion’s Rooftop Salon, Fourth Arts Block’s FAB Festival, Gowanus Art and Production’s First Look, Gibney Dance’s Show and Share, Center for Performance Research’s Spring Movement, New York University’s Master’s Thesis Showcase, and Movement Research’s Open Performance.
It’s not not about power
It’s not not about change
It’s not not about hope
It’s not not about now
It’s not not about our bodies
It’s not not about nothing
By E/D: Erin Cairns Cella and Dages Juvelier Keates
Sound: Jascha Narveson
Video: Joshua Dumas
Lighting Design: David Glista
Presented by Triskelion Arts
Contact / Crisis, 2018
A commissioned duo performance practice that took place in this space during the opening of the exhibition. Keates and Steeves contextualized their movement in somatic principles rather than shape seeking. Moving from the idea that the heart is an organ that empties and fills simultaneously, that limbs hang from the alien inside, the duo approached the body’s otherness with tentative vigilance and profound respect. Keates and Steeves describe their intention: “The Other is inherited. The Other is immediate. The Other cannot be contained. The Other cannot be shamed. The Other is always here: the one I run from in dreams, in effort, in time. The Other is inside all of us who have m/others.”
By Dages Juvelier Keates and Alexis Steeves
Sound by Joshua Dumas
Commissioned for L’Intrus (2018), commissioned by Natasha marie Llorens at Tabakalera
Reimagined for Callidus Guild at The Park Avenue Armory, also 2018
Free Your Flocking Clown (2016-2017)
By HAM: Amélie Gaulier, Dages Juvelier Keates, Rain Saukas and Alexis Steeves
Your Flocking Clown: Post Truth Edition (2017) at CPR
Post-truth edition. We are French, we are Estonian, we are American. We benefit from white privilege we buckle under patriarchy. We are immigrants, actors, activists, aggressors, deflectors. We consider: autocracy, projective identification, having a voice and being alone together.
Free Your Flocking Clown: Fact Check (2017) at BAX
We wonder: Is there a post-humanist self? Are we only human? What moves us in and out of our private physical island? Can we see the shadow of the icebergs of our embodied archive?
Free Your Flocking Clown: USA (2016) at Triskelion Arts
2016 Election edition. We are immigrants, we are women, we are queer. We benefit from white privilege we buckle under patriarchy. We are actors, activists aggressors, deflectors. We consider: looming, listening, projective identification, and the sniffling of Donald Trump. Sound collaborator: Joshua Dumas
Free Your Flocking Clown: SEX (2016) at Dixon Place
We are dancing in the anthropocene. We are alone together. We are a flock of humans. We wonder: Is there a post-humanist self? Are we only human? What moves us in and out of our private physical island? Can we see the shadow of the icebergs of our embodied archive? Special Guest: Claire Astruc. Sound Design: Joshua Dumas
Free Your Flocking Clown: Gallery Edition (2016) at “Permission Slip” at Art Helix
Embodying insights from Ranciere, Agamben, and the fluffiest sheep on earth... The inaugural flocking experiment with special guest Claire Astruc. Curated by Wilson Duggan and Jackie Cantwell
BOUNCE BOUNCE, 2016
"That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger."
- Friedrich Nietzsche (and Kelly Clarkson)
Inspired by images of floating buoys, pop-diva feminism, and the notion of a “strong woman,” E/D’s latest work, Bounce Bounce, unpacks the assumption that physical resiliency and emotional buoyancy are inextricably linked. This choreographic and sonic research complicates narratives of resiliency embedded in performances of femininity. The pursuit of bodily perfection and control dominates concert dance training and femininity. As such, physical performance becomes bound up with pleasure in, and identification with, an able, flexible, legible body-- a body that performs “strong woman.” Such bodies perform a kind of resiliency, but what happens when we can’t or don’t bounce back?
Using sound, light, imagination, and affect as material, E/D inhabits composer Jascha Narveson’s arresting soundscapes with lighting by David Glista.
Commissioned and presented by Triskelion Arts Presents
Choreography and Performance by E/D: Erin Cairns Cella & Dages Juvelier Keates
Music by Jascha Narveson
Costumes by E/D
Unsee, 2017
Unsee is an invitation to perceive what's known anew. Throughout the duration of this 3-4 hour performance the audience is guided to an indirect and temporary investment of a personal object or piece of clothing. These volunteered materials will be continuously combined and converted into wearable sculptures by ntilit. HAM will activate, inhabit and embody each fresh piece, folding it into, and eventually out of, the performance. Four dancers and one artist-designer - proposing, finding, fumbling, stating, entangling and unraveling what is seen and re-seen. By engaging and intriguing notions of what's private and what's shared this performance offers unexpected recognition. Responsibility, expression, intimacy and irreverence are all at stake as the personal transitions to the collective and back again. The experience and investment of both performer and audience is infinitely unfolding - making space and time for new ways of seeing, embodying and being within the haptic world we cohabitate.
Presented by The Neo Domestic Performance Art Festival at Glasshouse
By HAM with Ntilit
YOU MOVE ME, 2017
YOU MOVE ME is an evening of performances dedicated to movement curated for TWOFORTY by Natasha Marie Llorens. The faux velour inflatable couch with inset cup holders makes so many decisions for the body. Alexa West wants to know what is left for movement to discover. It is so difficult to find another body in time anew, ungoverned by projection and structural violence. Dages Juvelier Keates asks what the role of language is in attenuating that difficulty. YOU MOVE ME signals no virtue with movement, but understands it as a way to think about what is happening to us now, which is not the same as structural analysis because the body is excessive of that kind of thought, constitutively.
Dages Juvelier Keates and Alexis Steeves propose a conversation between two dancers who are relaxing open, listening, articulating what Rosalind Crisp calls “news from the body.” Words are important. Language congealed from Keates and Steeves’ combined seventy years of studio practice form a layer of contact, a sediment in the space we all inhabit. They will explore the possibilities of intimacy with each other, with observers, and with various affective, socio-bio bodies as they respond, relax, and refine their attention to the surfaces and scale of skin and gaze. Sound design by Joshua Dumas.
unfold into, 2016
Curated by Natasha marie Llorens as part of City and City at Parsons/The New School
with Amelie Gaulier, Rain Saukas, and Alexis Steeves
Dages Juvelier Keates invited Gaulier, Saukas, and Steeves to perform in tandem with a sculpture by Elizabeth Tubergen in a sound environment by Helene Kazan. The dance will nominally take place in the gallery, but the audience is invited to view it from the sidewalk of 5th Avenue. Keates’ work will attend to the interstice, to space between the Cities.
i will incorporate your symptoms
i will put them into my body
i will contain you although i cannot hope to contain myself
one pours and one watches
one speaks and one listens
what is the amplitude of the voice?
how far does the sound travel
a terrain of tenderness
the real issue is the split that reifies the boundaries
Sunday, September 18th, 5 – 7pm
Aronson Galleries and the Kellen Auditorium, next to the gallery
sound: Joshua Dumas
material consultant: Kerry Downey
Flamingo Flamingo, 2011-2016
Directed by Tanya Calamoneri for Company SoGoNo
Created with and performed by Erin Cairns Cella and Dages Juvelier Keates
Costumes by Mioko Mochizuki
Presented by Triskelion Arts Presents, “Comedy in Dance,” Annual Benefit, FLICfest at Irondale, Dixon Place “Crossing Boundaries,” Cool New York Dance Festival at WHITE WAVE, Temple University, Northside Festival, Marble House Project Gala
"Sexy poses and “hey look at me” hip shaking were interspersed with humorous, teeth-baring grimaces that verged on the grotesque, hinted at rage, and highlighted the bizarre."
- See more impressions by Veronica Hackethal for Dance Enthusiast.
Porous Torus, 2016
A quartet with the interactive sculptures of Shani Ha which question the body in its rapport with intimacy and otherness. These sculptures extend the body and become social prosthesis that one can appropriate to create new contexts of proximity.
Shani Ha's Embody project is a response to everyday social interactions and body representations. The series incarnate these shifting social boundaries and representations through transformative “Body Sculptures”
By HAM: Amélie Gaulier, Alexis Steeves, Dages Juvelier Keates, Rain Saukas
In collaboration with the visual designer Shani Ha
Curated by Doug Post for “Under Exposed” at Dixon Place
all i have are sensations, 2015
In all i have are sensations, E/D utilizes low frequency sound, light, and a range of physical tension to explore how physical sensations are felt, blurred, and heightened. By turns pointlessly driven and precisely manicured, this work questions: what if resistance to normative forms of femininity is just a glitch, an involuntary refusal to function? What happens when the invisible becomes hyper-visible? This play on tension asserts control, yet rends us powerless by forces stronger, older, bigger than ourselves. Erin and Dages are caught between dichotomies such as threat and safety, containment and abandon, monstrosity and beauty, and fast and slow. An athletic movement vocabulary, tightly crafted vignettes and pop-infused punctuation challenge expectations of what viewers feel and see when looking at "women." Sonic landscape built by new music composer Jascha Narveson.
Choreography and Performance by E/D: Erin Cairns Cella & Dages Juvelier Keates
Music by Jascha Narveson
Presented by Temple University (2016), Triskelion Arts “Split Bill” (2015), Northside Festival (2015), Art Seed at Marble House Residency (2015)
Satan In Drag, 2013
Historically, Lilith’s narrative was passed down through oral tradition, living only in the moment it was spoken aloud. We connect to this perishability of form, and utilize performance to investigate Lilith in real-time, undermining current social constructions of sexuality, gender, time and the body.
Popular representations portray a feminist rebel who subverts androcentrism and enjoys a liberal expression of her own will and sexuality. In traditional narratives, she is imagined as a woman created before Eve who refuses to lie beneath her husband during sex. In later Kabbalistic texts, she is literally figured as the wife of Satan, or even Satan in the guise of a female. The mythic Lilith is revered as an exemplary heroine, suspected as a seductress, and despised as a bloodthirsty child-murderer. Her myth is remarkably adaptive and tenacious. With SATAN IN DRAG, we ask: why?
Imagine walking into a labyrinth of fabric with only a headlamp to light your way. Your aural experience is variegated: chanting, panting, buzzing, slurping. Perhaps you are drawn towards the center of the room by intermittent light from your headlamp, the flash of a projected image, or the green smell of wet earth. There, in extremely high heels, a masked body works furtively, like a spider unable to escape her own web or stand on her own two feet. This body, morphing into a series of archetypal images, is trapped in a square patch of moss, held in place by the fabric installation which is revealed to be her garment, web, and captor.
As Lilith is a projection of our fears, we use video to literally project these fears onto the performer’s body. Inspired by Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” the video layers grotesque images of bodily animality, sexuality, and enactments of aggression with more abstract images from nature. Like our own repressed issues, the projected images can’t be seen when we shine light on them directly - instead they creep out and surprise us sideways. Lilith is an oral construction, and the audience helps to construct the experience SATAN IN DRAG. Prior to entering the installation, they interact with a microphone and their captured sounds are looped and integrated into our soundscape. Through their choices of words, pitch, noises, as well as light and movement once in the space, the audience is woven directly into the work’s structure. Expressing both agency and captivity, each person’s participation conceals or reveals another dimension of the installation.
By Lydian Junction, a cohort of five artists working at the intersection of performance, video art, installation, and music: Christopher Berg, Oliver Burns, Karla Carballar, Dages Juvelier Keates and Sarah Cameron Sunde
Supported by residency and performances “The Room” at New Georges
Scenic Installation with Anna Kiraly
Mask by Ebony White
Photography by Chance Magazine
Full photo spread in Chance Magazine Volume 2
POMP, 2022
Collaboration with Alexis Steeves, experienced at Vasastaden, Stockholm Sweden, February 2022
Photographs by Åke Ericson
