Tend
Julia Rae Antonick
A service based performance experience fulfilling a socially requisite and biologically exigent allogrooming need accompanied with self-care devised movement distractions focused to organize the nervous system, resolve conflicts, and contemplate power differentials all in the motile architecture of a possible post-pandemic convalescence environment.
Julia is developing a new work that is moving from research to early development of material. Research was reading, writing, and chewing on this: could a choreographic work offer a highly crafted but casual environment and a physical service that you would feel compelled to revisit every four to six weeks, alone or with a group of friends?
Positioning the audience as a consumer Tend excavates constructs of beauty, consumerism, touch, small talk, social privilege, emotional labor, invisibility in the workforce, and the commodification of servant culture through the ballooning fields of wealth-work and self-care. Colliding necessity, extravagance, and irrelevance, it imagines a world where your monthly dance appointment is a legitimate need, a necessary line item in your personal budget. A service providing a much needed place to rest, recharge, reflect, reconcile. An environment supporting small talk, catching up, grooming bodies and relationships in turn.
The work being imagined might look something like this:
An audience of two to four checking in at a reception desk
A choreographed service for tending hair, skin, or nails to activate c-tactile nerve fibers
Vellus through androgenic
Scalp through neck
Arms through fingertips
The other attendee(s) sitting in the lounge area and lightly chatting together and with the receptionist
Occasionally watching the movement of the service being performed
Or flipping through a devised magazine sitting on a coffee table
Being guided through an experience of small talk as social glue
Observing and being observed
Body positive chitchat
Reflective
Reassuring
Sending you back into the world
Socially stimulated
Somatically organized
This is an evolving work. Current artists on the project are:
Julia Rae Antonick – choreographer/director
Heather LaHood – architect
Joe St.Charles – composer
Chih-Hsien Lin – performer
Jenn Freeman – project discussion/performer
JmeJames – project discussion/performer
Tend is being created in tandem with Jonathan Meyer’s project as though your body were right (and the gentler world mistaken). These pieces are conceived as a performance diptych and able to be viewed independently or as a double feature. They are being scheduled for provisional performances fall of 2021.
Photography – Ian Vecchiotti
Pictured – Amanda Maraist
To find scheduled events visit our calendar.
