Photo by Peter Raper.
Tickets: $15, $20, $30, sliding scale
Purchase Tickets
If so, was it good? is a new dance theater project by Brooklyn/Lenapehoking-based artists Sofia Engelman, Lindsey Jennings, Delaney McDonough, and Em Papineau.
The quartet enlists strategic storytelling, assertive speculation, everyday clamor, and deception to grapple with the polarization of personal and political identity and ideology in present-day USA. In this Ozian dystopia, Engelman, Jennings, McDonough, and Papineau move through practices of Inauthentic Movement and improvisational interviews, toggling between and falling into roles of interrogators, newscasters, childhood friends, therapists, love interests, survivalists, conspiracists, tricksters, and more.
From the tales of a QANON-devout grandmother to memories of chronic high school academic dishonesty to an aimless news segment generated by Chat GPT, the strategies of the fake news machine and fraudsters everywhere are employed to craft a dark, dysfunctional performance scape. A climate of urgency and a need to survive through the noise, reign supreme.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Sofia Engelman + Em Papineau are life partners, educators, and choreographic collaborators living in Lenapehoking // Brooklyn, NY. Sofia + Em's first collaborative project was presented at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts while they were students at Smith College. Since then, they have held choreographic residencies at The Living Room, Ponderosa, The Dance Complex, MOtiVE Brooklyn, The Croft, Mana Contemporary, Sky Hill Farm Studio, The Floor on Atlantic, College of the Atalantic, and School for Contemporary Dance & Thought to develop works in their INSTANT SAVIORS series and their 2022 project, GRIEF CAROUSEL, a collaboration with Albert Mathias. In addition to presenting their work at these residency spaces, the pair have performed at festivals including FRESH Festival, EstroGenius Festival, AS220's Providence Movement Festival, Queer Spectra, Post/Future Performance Festival, and Dancing Queerly Boston, as well as other spaces they love dearly such as Judson Church, Green Street Studios, BAAD!, Triskelion Arts, and freeskewl. Their work has been supported by NEFA, NYFA, FCA, and Northampton Arts Council and their individual performance credits include projects by Kathleen Hermesdorf, David Appel, Michael Figueroa, Tyler Rai, Claudia-Lynn Rightmire, Simon Thomas-Train, and Alice Gosti. They founded and directed freeskewl (now skewl), a platform for dance, discussion, education, and reparations during the COVID pandemic (2020-2022).
Lindsey Jennings is a dance-artist, teacher, collage-maker, and performer based in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, NY). She currently works as a freelance dancer, designer, and teacher for organizations such as Bates Dance Festival, Notes in Motion Outreach Dance Theatre, and Artichoke Dance Company and has been an Artist-in-Residence and Teaching Artist at MOtiVE Brooklyn. She's danced with/for artists such as Abby Zbikowski, Kendra Portier/BANDPortier, Jennifer Monson, Kaitlin Fox, Betsy Miller Dance Projects, and Marion Spencer, among others, and has shared work in various digital, performance, and material mediums at Martha Graham Studios (New York, NY) The Field Center (Bellows Falls, VT), Waxworks at Triskelion Arts (New York,NY), Greenspace (New York, NY), Movement Research (New York, NY), MOtiVE Brooklyn (NY), Krannert Center for the Performing Arts (Urbana, IL), Krannert Art Museum (Urbana, IL), Bates Dance Festival New Works Showcase (Lewiston, ME), Links Hall (Chicago, IL), and online with freeskewl.
Delaney McDonough is an events producer and dancer based in Brooklyn, NY. They’ve performed with the late great Kathleen Hermesdorf’s FAKE Company, Quentin Burley Dance Group, Annie Kloppenberg, Heidi Henderson, Martha Tornay, and in Haegue Yang’s 'Handles' installation at MoMA. Delaney's early career was spent in rural Maine at the Denmark Arts Center (Denmark, ME) and The Living Room (Portland, ME) hosting and producing the work of hundreds of artists from around the world. They taught dance to students ages 4-80 in schools, studios, libraries, islands and arts centers across Maine and the Northeast including a semester at Bates College and two semesters at Colby College. Bates Dance Festival holds a huge place in Delaney's heart where they spent many summers as a Mentor for the Young Dancers' Intensive. After leaving Maine, they worked for years as a Production Manager for dance festivals across the country, including Performance Mix Festival (NY), KHFRESH Festival (CA), and Lions Jaw Dance & Performance Festival (MA). Delaney has also worked for many individual artists including as Production Manager for Anh Vo's Babylift, Administrative Associate for Sara Juli, and Projection Integrator for Brother(hood) Dance!'s Bessie Nominated Afro/Solo/Man. Delaney now works full time as a Project Manager for creative agency Prodject LLC producing events for brands including Khaite, Cartier, and The Met Gala.