to morn (u) . Daybreak.
Fifty walks up a hill in California at sunrise marking the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021.
A video book of writing and movement on loss, the sunrise, and the practice of persistence.
By Abby Crain with Video by Chani Bockwinkel and music by John Beck (piano) and Miles Lassi (arrangement).
Commissioned by Gravity (SF)
LINDENAU (RIFLE CLUB) PARTY FOR THE OTHER SIBLINGS (2018)
Created and performed by Abby Crain
Set in Crain’s real and imagined ancestral landscape, Crain stages an awkward family reunion for the forgotten and uninvited.
This is a solo performance that happens in a dance hall. This is a a solo performance that happens in a gun club. This is a solo performance that happens in a muddy river that has slowed to a trickle.
Swimming Pool is interplanetary time play. Swimming Pool is geologic mutuality. Swimming Pool is lasering between apocalypses and utopias. Swimming Pool is a star expanding and collapsing and then another star expanding and collapsing nearby. Swimming Pool is a really trashy ride.
Created and performed by Abby Crain, Layton Lachman and Mara Poliak, with lighting design by Elizabeth Ardent, sculpture installation by Lisa Rybovich Crallé, and sound design by Samuel Hertz.
SNAKE TALK (2016)
in collaboration with Layton Lachman and Mara Poliak, along with musician by Sam Hertz and lighting designer by Elizabeth Ardent.
“There is something strained, desperate, precarious about the zany that activates the spectators desire for distance.”
—Sianne Ngai describing the aesthetic category of “zany” as outlined in her 2012 book “Our Aesthetic Categories.”
Snake Talk is an extreme, disquieting, feminist evening length performance spectacle that navigates interspecies intimacy, feminine voraciousness and wild unfettered dancing. It is staged in the void and the nightclub, and involves a lecture demonstration about snakes, spatialized sound sources, smoke machines, nightclub lighting, minimalist opera, and voice modulation distortion,. Snake Talk presents a slippery and indefinable part-animal female subject who lives within an aesthetic terrain of discomfort, excess and distortion. This unsettling manifestation of neo-liberalism will do anything for survival, but we are not sure if we want to be close to her. Trailer
CREATURE HUMAN CREATURE HUMAN CREATURE HUMAN (2015)
conceived and directed by Abby Crain in collaboration with the performers Mara Poliak, Layton Lachman, Olive Blackburn, and Harold Burns.
music by Sam Hertz and lighting design by Elizabeth Ardent.
CREATURE HUMAN CREATURE HUMAN CREATURE HUMAN is a failing epic evening length dance spectacle for six performers that lives in the liminal space that is shared by animals and humans. It is both too much and too little. It plays between disgusting excess and not enough. Costumes are absurd, inappropriately provocative, and impossible to tear our eyes from. Dances play between barely legible and embarrassingly overexecuted. The dancer are in heat, the dancers are desperate for nourishment, the dancers are looking for a home in a place where their habitat no longer exists, the dancers are shedding their antlers, their skin, and their fur, they are burying acorns in the ground in places they immediately forget. They are wondering why their friends are dying and disappearing, why the water tastes funny and the is choked with algae. They wonder with a small part of their brain but then they hurry on to thrust their horns against another warm body and find their dinner. In CREATURE HUMAN CREATURE HUMAN CREATURE HUMAN, we recognize ourselves as positioned among the animal, the childlike, the queer, and the crazy, the feminine and the sublime. We recognize this fecund nowhereville as our home. We learn its rules, we adapt to its structures, and we find them pleasing. They make us laugh and pant. They make us party. They make us cry. Trailer.
SWARM (2014)
conceived and directed by Abby Crain
music by Adam Sonderberg
SWARM is a choreographic response to the age of deskilling and the economy of ideas. It is an infinitely expandable and contractable performance for one to 100 dancer and non dancer perfomers of any age that can be taught in five hours and perfomed in any open space. It presents an artificially constructed “organic” form for a group experience that builds from a gentle quiver to ecstatic abandon.
Abby Crain 