The Naked Stark: tonight – which is last night – tomorrow – or – the time we make

A dance and music quartet for public space: examining time as a blueprint for experience, a construct, the distance between moments, a way to perceive change. Collaborators and performers, Ajibola Rivers (cello), Andy Thierauf (percussion), Harlee Trautman (dance), and Katherine Kiefer Stark (dance), invite the audience to witness up-close as music and movement spill across a 12’x16’ rug. Shifting between established structures and the unchartedness of spontaneity, we propel each other through the performance.

The work emerged from our fascination with the way we feel and value time qualitatively while living inside a dominant culture that quantifies and monetizes time. We notice the ways this capitalist approach to time asks us to perceive time as steady, either moving forward, in a circle, or even a spiral (coiled with regularity like a spring). Our work aims to bring the way we perceive time to life as we wonder how to transcend the constant, prevailing context of our lives. Overlapping, looping, disrupting, supporting: we navigate and surface our individual emotional experiences of time through our mediums and in our relationships with each other.

Photos: JH Kertis