Togetherness

“In Togetherness Melissa sets up a series of deeply intimate agreements relying on feeling and sensing Otherness through the tension of distance. Togetherness offers an opportunity to experience the turbulence, complexity, and power that we have as individuals and as communities. As I witnessed, I questioned my place in the world and what this brief time together means. It is profoundly poetic that literally on the eve of a mandated quarantine Togetherness was performed, only once. Little did we know that we were headed into a long year of being alone, isolated, and yearning for more- togetherness.” -Eric Geiger, Mentor/Advisor

Togetherness proposes a series of movement constellations that turn around the questions:

How to be together?
What does being together feel like?
How can we create an intimate space for transformation?
How is the dance moving us now?
How can we listen and attend to the space around us?
How can we feel and support each other as we hold witness to our dance/presence/moment?

Working ourselves through the dance, in Togetherness we engage in these questions with our body in order to produce a specific kind of attention and presence for ourselves and the audience.

In close collaboration with the light design and the live sound amplification of performers in interaction with props (two pairs of maracas, a thin rope, and a PVC black tube) we follow our latencies, sometimes moving together and at others on our own but always holding the space for each other. With an uncompromising minimal aesthetic we keep the dance alive in a trance like state.

The end result is the play between proximity and distance, silence and sound, what is opaque and what is visible. Maintaining the space for each other, we witness our movements, dance and transformation.

Togetherness was originally made in collaboration with Nataly Rojo and Madelyn Astaundu for winterWorks 2020, UCSD. However, we did not have the opportunity to perform it in front of an audience because exactly on that weekend of March 2020 COVID-19 came to our life and the theater closed, as everything else. We were all sent home for an indefinite period of time.

After more than a year of experiencing the pandemic and witnessing its effect in the (collective) body, we find it fundamental to return to this dance and revisit the questions we were tackling then. In the desire to be close and intimate in performance we see a healing potential as we share the work with others.