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WE MAKE DANCES ABOUT PLACE AND ENDURANCE. We exhaust our bodies with highly physical choreographies that reflect our collective training histories of improvisation, Olympic-level sport, ballet, modern dance technique, photography, and sound design. THE INVESTIGATION OF LAND AND NOTIONS OF HOME are drivers for our work. Sometimes this means diving into explorations about nostalgia, memorializing, and death and dying practices. Sometimes this means committing to durational walking practice, mapping miles of land and mapping our internal spaces with the same concern/care/curiosity. Our work is a grief ritual, a caretaking practice, a search for the utopic within the quotidian all at the same time. We utilize movement as place-making and the body as archive. We travel between remembering the past, attending to the present moment, and imagining the future. We grapple with the necessity of proximity to each other: we shake, rumble and drag each other to the ground, lift each other up, carry + sing to each other. OUR DANCES ARE SENSORIAL ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN SITE/PERFORMERS/AUDIENCES that are intimate and relational. Within this, the body becomes landscape, home, monument, spellcaster, boundary, and the location of desire.

 
 
Leah and Mauriah (L+M) began making dances together while in graduate school in the flatlands of the Midwest. Their duet works are endurance-driven events attentive to location and place. For their most recent work, ARMAGEDDON OR SUNRISE OR SOMETHING, they received the Wanda M. Nettle Prize for Choreography from the University of Illinois-Urbana- Champaign. 

body as landscape
body as home
body as monument
body as spellcaster
body as boundary
body as engine
body as location of desire
body as caretaker
body as dust
​


​ARMAGEDDON OR SUNRISE OR SOMETHING is an evening length duet made for and by Leah Wilks and Mauriah Kraker. The work is built on scores investigating exhaustion, endurance and the sensuality/the geographic of both internal and external landscapes. The duo grapples with the necessity of proximity to each other: they shake, rumble and drag each other to the ground, carry + sing to each other. Pulling from the duo’s different training histories in improvisation, olympic-level sport, ballet, modern dance technique, photography, and sound design, the piece functions as both a grief ritual and a space for reckoning with limitation.



​…a work that calls forth grief, joy, exhaustion, as well as the manifestation of the daily and the generational. This work touches a space of the finite and infinite, natural + supernatural, commonplace and magical, disaster + resiliency.
- Chloe Nagle, Smile Politely review








​It feels like a dive inside to maneuver the body elsewhere… a resistant state of internality against a hideous political world we live in right now.   
​- Tere O’Connor














photos: Natalie Fiol