Tend is a service-based performance experience fulfilling a socially requisite and biologically exigent allogrooming need accompanied by performance of self-care informed movement distractions focused to organize the nervous system, resolve conflicts, and contemplate power differentials all in the motile architecture of a reflective, airy, enveloping, and luminescent convalescence banquette. 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 haptic, phatic, and kinetic service providing a much-needed place to rest, recharge, reflect, reconcile. An environment supporting small talk, catching up, grooming bodies and relationships in turn. In short, come ready to chat, be touched/touch, and experience movement.

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. 

Julia’s new work is currently moving from the research phase to the first-iteration performances. Research was moving, discussing, 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 friend?

The work being imagined might look something like this:

An audience of two checking in at a reception desk
A choreographed service for tending hair and skin 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. Artists who have contributed to the project are:

Julia Rae Antonick – choreographer/director
Jonathan Meyer – environmental construction/design/project discussion
Heather LaHood – architect/project discussion/environmental construction/design
Joe St.Charles – composer/project discussion
Jeff Hancock – environmental construction/costuming/project discussion
Chih-Hsien Lin – project discussion/main cast performer
Enid Smith – project discussion/main cast performer
Gina Hoch-Stall – project discussion/main cast performer/care contact
Ali Lorenz – project development cast/project discussion
Phillip Wood – project development cast/project discussion
Jordan Reinwald – project development cast/project discussion
Kellyn Jackson – project development cast/project discussion
Jenn Freeman – project discussion/graphic development/project development cast
JmeJames – project discussion/project development cast
Amanda Maraist – project movement exploration
Precious Jennings – childcare
Jamila Kekula Kinney – project training/discussion
Jyreika Guest – project training/discussion
Francine Kelley – project training/discussion
Suzi Coates – project training/discussion
Jenny Oelerich – project discussion/project development cast
Charlie Vail – project discussion/project development cast
Maddy Joss – project discussion/project development cast
Ian Vecchiotti – photography/videography