There's a radical part of my nature that [IS SCREAMING FOR RELIEF!] … just can't get quiet. 
- Deborah Hay [and Olivia Brown] 

No Such Thing is a performative response to a long form dialogic process with professional dance artist Lisa Oppegard. The work is ongoing, partial, and incomplete. As the pandemic intersected with our process, the work became evocative and timely. Lisa and Krista worked within a wide context, using the framing of historical events from the early 1900s, the life & creative work of Isadora Duncan, plus performative inquiries based in personal narratives. This project has a multitude of source materials that draw from the aesthetics of the art deco movement and the bubbling energy of cocktail culture. Together they envisioned a mirage, a fever dream of raucous laughter & exhaustive happiness … that slowly fades away to the quiet sound of a record player scratching.

"Who are we after everyone goes home, after we leave the theater … when we're no longer performing?"

They discussed the ways they interpret the liminal internal & performative external spaces. How they manage expectations. They shape shifted between the performances they offer others and the introspective places they retreat to when they're alone. Inspired by the final line, “there is more," from Olivia Brown’s poem, they considered what is that constant unchanging presence of our true selves? 

"What is that unchanging part of us that transcends our physical form?

As they sat with, and moved through, philosophical questions of their own, mixed with the historical, tragic, context of dance icon Isadora Duncan's life in the 1910-1920s they drifted … finding the words of experimental dance artist Deborah Hay as a contemporary bridge along the way: there’s no such thing as a single direction.

To surrender the pattern of facing a single direction, "assume a front." I wanted to get rid of that pattern. Arbitrarily deciding that this was front, why do I do that? I do that because of tradition. I do that because of history. I do that because I know that's how I get from one place to another. Cancelling all the ways that I treat an audience as front … the limitation of those facings seemed huge to me and I wanted to get rid of them. My front was infinite.  I realize all the ways I have a front. A thought is a single direction. A behavior, a habit. There are just so many ways I behave as thought there's a single direction in my life, when in fact, physically bodily, there is no such thing as a single direction.
- Deborah Hay

The dancer of the future will be one whose body and soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of the soul will have become the movement of the body. […] You were once wild here. Don't let them tame you.
- Isadora Duncan

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I loved the open-endedness and that the answers are still out there to be found. It was quite therapeutic. What I loved was the opportunity to feel all the feelings, and I appreciated that connection to spirit because in that darkness you often find light. There's a calmness in acknowledging that "I don’t know where I'm headed" and the whole piece reflects that, that circle of life and the evolution of a human being - every human has a different experience on this earth.

Probably what I love most of about dance is story lives in music. The way music and dance allows for interpretation is what I loved about the last section; it presented a lot of questions. And as we looked historically for context around Isadora Duncan’s life, her pain, we began to find synchronicities in the present moment of the pandemic. The discordant and lullaby qualities of the sound design reflected her circumstances where she is neither here nor there, and grasping at the other realm. You could tell Duncan was filled with so much pain and darkness, that performing the first section feels heavy to me now, after all the world has been through. I know you have to have the valleys to have the peaks, so having Deborah Hay's words as a counterpoint created a place to evolve from that darkness. A bridge.

Both Duncan and Hay went against the grain and allowed themselves to think differently from those around them. They were constantly asking questions, pushing against the norms, which was an interesting synchronicity to our inquiries. In this time of humanity when everyone has a label, there is a label for everything: Mom, student, dancer, teacher … and what it means to go a different direction and just say “I am” instead. I am. I exist. And that “I am” that I seek is not static either, it is constantly changing. The choice is there to present ego rather than our true self and this felt like an invitation to explore that duality.

- Lisa Oppegaard

Photography by Allison Kazmierski

Garment by Tiffany Miller Designs

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I must be here. I have to notice all that is happening. To see you, to include you in my seeing. … So my practice is really about being here, and being in relation at the same time … I have to be here to be in relation with you … I don’t know where I’m going, but I trust my process so much that I welcome each new question about what is possible in being awake in relationship to audience … not just audience, but the rest of the world … Through the performance of that material, the dance let’s me know what it is … through the performance I find out what all this happenstance might possibly reveal to me about what the dance is … it’s about the performance of another dance.
- Deborah Hay