Projects

40 minutes

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train is about making it through. We work together within a high-effort movement vocabulary that explores ideas of implosion, being up against, adjoining and abutting, merging, and scaffolding. A wall is used as an additional source of physical support. Softness, support, and communication emerge amid this precarity of bodies, props, and architecture. 

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performances at Judson Church via EstroGenius Festival (NYC) and Judson Church via THAT SHOW (long form) (NYC)​

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*developed with generous support from THAT SHOW

55 minutes

collaboration with Lindsey Jennings and Delaney McDonough

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If so, was it good? enlists strategic storytelling, assertive speculation, everyday clamor, and deception to grapple with the polarization of personal and political identity and ideology in present-day USA. In this Ozian dystopia, Engelman, Jennings, McDonough, and Papineau move through practices of Inauthentic Movement and improvisational interviews, toggling between and falling into roles of interrogators, newscasters, childhood friends, therapists, love interests, survivalists, conspiracists, tricksters, and more.

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performances at Center for Performance Research (NYC), The School for Contemporary Dance & Thought (MA), Arts On Site (NYC), The Brick (NYC)

18 minutes

collaboration with Albert Mathias

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GRIEF CAROUSEL is an embodied eulogy. It sources from memories and inherited artifacts of individuals whom we lost during the early COVID-19 pandemic. These include a notebook left to us by a mentor (containing notes for an unfinished dance), clothing from Sofia’s aunt, memories from a loved one’s cancer journey, voicemails, and letters. This project acts as an archive of moments and movements. We use plywood signs to express subtext during both spoken and danced sections.

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performances at freeskewl (NYC), Arts On Site (NYC), Triskelion Arts (NYC), BAAD! (NYC), Westbeth (NYC), and MOtiVE Brooklyn (NYC)

30 minutes

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​The first work in our INSTANT SAVIORS series. This highly physical project investigated queer love through compositional, narrative, and embodied themes of orientation, futurity, world-building, ephemerality, failure and mess. 

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performances at Ponderosa (Germany), Lion's Jaw Festival's The THING (MA), Movement Research at the Judson Church (NYC), FRESH Festival (CA), EstroGenius Festival at Kraine Theater (NYC), HUT at School for Contemporary Dance and Thought (MA), Mark DeGarmo Dance (NYC), Smith College (MA), Providence Movement Festival at AS220 (RI), and The Dance Complex (MA)​

20 minutes

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ATTENTION: once again is a performative talkback. It orients around a project description/buzzword salad riddled with nonspecific, superficial phrasing. This work examines art culture, abstraction, and language.

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performances at DanceNOW at Joe's Pub (NYC) and Jaeeun Lee's House Party​ (NYC)

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*developed with generous support from the Leimay Foundation

18 minutes

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till Death and a Day is a dance theater work which imagines a deconstructed, tragicomic bachelorette party for Ruth and Naomi, two figures from the Hebrew Bible. This duet work, plagued by American bachelorette party rituals, features a phallic cake, party banners, dildos, inflatable cucumbers, shots, and shirts with graphics of “life size” representations of bodies with bikinis. These objects take on roles as bible, baby, dress, phallus, punching bag, and more

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performances at Arts On Site (NYC), Brooklyn Art Haus (NYC), Westbeth (NYC)

32 minutes

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​The second work in our INSTANT SAVIORS series. This project heavily incorporates our emerging "unsilencing" practice to allow us to navigate moments of instability safely in real time. Idolic symbology pushes movement beyond the ordinary. Timing, pause, and repetition are used to underscore and undercut.

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performances at School for Contemporary Dance and Thought (MA), Movement Research (NYC), The Dance Complex (MA), and Tufts University (MA)

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*developed with generous support from Northampton Arts Council, Dance Complex, The School for Contemporary Dance & Thought

35 minutes

Within a queer, romantic frame, ​Where the air is light and clear focuses on physicality. The physicality of two similar bodies. The performers go for a ride, following and interrupting momentum, finding space together and apart. We are making home and making up.

performances at Smith College (MA), Boston University (MA), Fresh Dance Friday at Green Street Studios (MA), The Living Room (ME), and The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts​​ (DC)

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*developed with generous support from The Living Room