“A work that splices through time to explore the continuity of linear and horizontal energy in motion. Describing its essence, I’d say I visualized an aurora - that’s just how radiant it was.”
Choreography + Collaboration
My research orbits around the broader consideration of what is performance. More pointedly I am interested in reframing, rethinking, and reconsidering from an interdisciplinary perspective, whether it is through the learning environments I facilitate, the events I curate, or the performative spaces I design and present upon. Recent works have been performed in traditional and alternative spaces and have taken hybrid forms of installations, full-length dance works, and series of events conceived as structures for participatory spectatorship and performance. I see my choreographic process as a social practice, most recently experimenting with “relationships as material” in crafting my dance works collaboratively.
My methods are immersive and have has increasingly combined various disciplines like sculpture, conceptual art, site-specific performance installation, and design, showcasing the diverse paths in my creative journey and the crucial role research beyond the body plays in my practice. It’s my experience and interaction with these other forms that is paramount to my dance making. They are my processing unit — it is how information comes in, despite coming out as movement or performance.
My creative approach is guided by my desire to investigate a curiosity, not necessary answer it. Part of my creative research practice is to ask questions through the work. Upon creation, my hope is to plant a seed in the spectator’s mind and to provoke thought and embodied response beyond the experience of seeing the work in real-time.
“I’m more interested in crafting experiences than presenting polished, finished products, even though there is quite a bit of structure that goes into designing my dance works. It’s an approach that I have coined ‘chaos in structure’ - there are parameters and set structures, but there is also possibility for chance and the unknown. It’s an authentic and collaborative experience with whomever is in the room with me”
Photos: Snovian Image Media and Jason Tam
Caitlyn Schrader’s perspective on contemporary dance making and commitment to craft is evident through her sweeping, full-bodied movement coupled with embodied sensuality and juxtaposed with bursts of quirky physical abandon, agile specificity in gesture, and moments of suspension and pause. Her works include movement vocabulary woven together that are dynamically layered, with a keen focus on the spatial architecture and nuanced subtlety, both purposeful and deliberate.
Schrader’s aesthetic and choreographic strategies fall within the historical framework of postmodernism and have clear antecedents to conceptual art and Fluxus. In her practice she plays with gesture/gestural abstraction and accumulation, repetition, and variations on theme. She also experiments with spatial patterns/pathways, explores body percussion as aesthetic choice, and utilizes polycentricity, disorientation, or lack of frontality as tools. Using a mix of improvisation alongside set movement material, she employs diverse points of initiation and flow of energy, all while attuning attention of internal focus with external awareness and acknowledgment of the space.
Collaboration has been key in the making of her work thus far - she has collaborated with composers, sculptors, filmmakers, writers, social practice artists, musicians, costume designers, and fellow dancers.
Note on Collaboration.
I see collaborators as integral participants and performers in my work. Collaboration allows dialogue between different voices, different anatomies, different perspectives, and different experiences. My collaborative relationships have aided in activating the mind in ways unable when alone in the studio, ensuring my choreographic practice has new impetus when devising movement phrases and creative works.
Dance Works:
Work Zones (Re-Chantier) (2024)
Excerpts of a durational, performative experiment as part of Work Zones (Re-Chantier), a construction site-inspired group exhibition involving textile surfaces and live art multimedia performance.
Collaboration: sculptor Kasia Ozga, Philippe Fontès, musician Serge Valla, architect Lise Serra, and kt williams
Intercession (2024)
Durational performative experiment of physical bodies, projections, fabric, sound, and surveillance cameras
Collaboration: Bjorn Bates and Sean Mulcahy
make me your manifesto (2023)
Passcode to access video link: mmym23
For a behind the scenes look at the making of this work, click here
Review/Press, click here
Commentary Track/Artist Interview, click here
Physical Program, click here
“make me your manifesto instinctively incentivizes its participants to deconstruct the liminality of reality from the outside, < IN >.” Annesah Abdur-Razzaq, (Yes!Weekly.com, 2023)
of liminal space (2022)
For a behind the scenes look at the making of this work, click here
Concert review, click here
Photo: Snovian Image Media
Ballet for a Lonely Violinist (2020)
Collaboration and live violin performance by Nathan Southwick
Music Composition: Lera Auerbach (2002)
Photo: Bradley Rhoton
Drawn ( 2015)
Collaboration: Silvia Graziano (writer) and Douglas Urbank (filmmaker)
Photo: Bradley Rhoton
Photo: Nicole Tomaselli