Heather Kravas

A trio that explores failure, absurdity, and motherhood within the chaos of modern life and late-stage capitalism using intimate, immersive staging. laughing dances is a trio performed by myself and longtime collaborators Rebecca Brooks and Cecilia Lisa Eliceche, featuring dramaturgical interventions by DD Dorvillier and lighting by Madeline Best. A dance for torsos, guts, and furious limbs, the work explores our mutability, monstrousness, and shared experience of motherhood. It is a development of 20 years of dancing together, of learning from one another, challenging, provoking, questioning, being there for hard creations and unexpected life turns. We are researching a collective movement intelligence over time. In it for the long haul, we consider laughing dances as a template to be revisited every 5 years, until we die, a dance of change and insistence, acceptance and ridiculous rigor. laughing dances/first edition is an accumulation of numerous and increasingly odd endeavors. Repetition, a recurrence in all my work, is used here merely as a setup that exists to have the rug pulled out from under it. Non sequiturs build a disjointed fairytale with cookies, villains, pratfalls, fart sounds, naked singing, wrestling, DIY costumes and folk steps. Alongside us, our audience is pulled into tense proximity, seated on all four sides of the dance, chairs placed directly upon the stage. The choreography unfolds up close, but also surrounds the spectators and stretches into distant spaces, utilizing all possible exits where loud crashes and actions happen out of sight. We are all implicated in this too much-ness. Feminist, and in pursuit of radicalism beyond its contrarian conceptual underpinnings, laughing dances upsets conventional methods of presentation to question notions of how we play and how we work. And when. And for whom. Photo Credit: Jason Starkie