Current Projects
Photo by Betsy Brandt.
Dicks
Dicks is a companion piece to Janes (2019). .
Classical ballet and early modern dance have movement vocabularies that are intimately tied to character and gender. Some believe that performing in these genres requires surrendering to prescribed notions of a different time. I aim to locate and revive the hyper-gendered, underlying inceptions within the forms, while working with contemporary bodies that run the gamut of gender identity. I also aim to highlight the sexuality of the steps, the sensual posturing, and their relationship to somatic functionality.
I contend that sexual and gender expression are liberated by investing in the exaggerated worlds of romanticism and early feminism. I believe there is much to learn from allowing people of different ages, races and gender identities to partake in this kind of extravagance as a way to deconstruct, locate, and employ alternative power systems. This type of work takes time and is pedagogical in nature. The movement material has to metabolize into the dancers’ bones and merge with their way of being. Discovering ways to keep raising the stakes of these elaborate movement gauntlets leads to a new kind of sensual virtuosity.
Janes & Dicks will essentially be a feminist re-telling of the story of style with an undertone of political manifesto. I posit that this work will open up a new acceptance of the role sex plays in dance and the role dance plays in the construction of identity.
Janes (2019)
(2019-) is an exploration of female tropes and characteristic movement stylizations inherited from Classical Ballet and early Modern Dance. The work attempts to metabolize the dynamic, somatic and expressive functionality of this oeuvre while simultaneously tracking some of the questionable socio-political remnants of this fetishized, romantic approach to moving. Versions of the work include solos, a quartet and octet. All iterations were created in intimate partnership with the performers who range in age from 19 to 60 and include veteran performer/creators Kendra Portier and Roxanne d’Orleans Juste. Set to a haunting score by sound designer Tony Reimer, Janes is part evocation, part tragic tale, and every part an exquisite examination of bodies traversing complex emotional terrain.
Grand Etude or Playing Dead
a screendance in collaboration with Betsy Brandt
Like much of Hook’s work, Grand Etude or Playing Dead, a Dance for Camera made with dramaturge Betsy Brandt, tackles bravery of performance, the act of performance itself, and the hyper vivid character of the performers. It is part document and part poetic rendering of some of Hook’s main tenets as a teacher which include sensualizing technique and holding insane amounts of detail that transform the task of performance into hyperbolic meditations on the self that border on camp.
For more info on Sara’s work in the classroom, click here.