as though your body were right

It is clear that the action of the thumbsucking child is determined by pleasure
Humans break themselves in like animals, which means to say, dressage
The body becomes a useful force only if it is both productive and subjugated
That inside their boundless emotion all things may shudder with joy
I am talking about the cells and fluids witnessing themselves

-from the florilegium

Jonathan is developing a new work that is moving from research to early development of material. Research has been exploring what it would mean to choreograph the cells’ movement rather than the body’s; it has been reading, thinking, and writing about personal and systemic traumas including rape, torture, modern slavery, and child soldiering; it has been grappling with how these two areas of inquiry relate. Embodiment means that we have power in the world. Embodiment means that we are vulnerable to each other. The individual is the emergence of the trillion cells. The nation is the emergence of the million individuals. The cellular can speak to the societal. How could that be true?

The work being imagined might look something like this:
An audience of four enters into a room within a room
A micro-theater, a puppet theater
The performer’s body is the landscape of the stage
Watching the cells of the body move like the murmuration of starlings
A creature that would live on such a landscape
Crawling over it, flying over it
Calling it home

This is an evolving work. Current artists on the project are:

Jonathan Meyer – direction, choreography, & body performance
Sara Zalek – body performance & puppetry performance
Tom Lee – puppetry design & puppetry performance
Lauren Kunath – puppetry performance
Joe St.Charles – music & sound composition

as though your body were right is being created in tandem with Julia Antonick’s project Tend. These pieces are conceived as a performance diptych able to be viewed independently or as a double feature. They are being scheduled for provisional performances fall of 2021.

Photography – Ian Vecchiotti
Pictured – Jonathan Meyer

To find scheduled events visit our calendar.