VICINITY DIPTYCH is the combined name for the two installation performance works Tend and as though your body were right. These projects are independent companion pieces that explore overlapping and divergent themes of proximity, power, vulnerability of the body, and the human need for connection, trust, and touch. They are able to be experienced independently or as a double feature.

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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. 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.

For Tend, audience members select an hour long appointment for which to attend the performance.

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as though your body were right is an invitation to confront the bodiliness of being human. It is a shared experience of the vulnerability of being a body, and of the power of being a body. It is a peeling back of one aspect of being human, the social skin that guards and protects all that is contained therein; the child, the infant, the animal, the organic mass, the incomprehensibly vast community of cells. It is a query to the wisdom of the cells, to offer some gleam of how to be one among many in a system that is vaster, more powerful, and more merciless that we can comprehend.

Audiences may attend one or both pieces. Both works intend to significantly challenge the audience and simultaneously practice radical care for each attendee, inviting people into a safer space to delve into inherently uncomfortable but rewarding material.