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Headlong believes that art, especially performance, is an ideal place for cultivating empathy and connection between people and communities with different experiences, identities and backgrounds.
Our creative practices invite people to witness and testify, embodying and invoking culture with its problems and virtues so that we may see ourselves, each other and the broader culture as resources for making meaningful lives.
Particularly in a time of cultural splintering and digital retreat, as well as the persistent inequities that continue to cause harm: we believe that convening people in real space and time in any way possible(!) to share artistic practices and productions has the power to enrich individual lives and change the culture for the better.
Learn more about some past Headlong work here.
And we'd love for you to interact with some of what we are exploring now.
Practicing to Die is our current work. The phrase is borrowed from dance artist Eiko Otake. The space below will update with pieces and research for this project.
Ishmael Houston Jones and I perform a radio dance on disaster historian Scott Knowles' Covid Calls- a daily conversation aimed at creating an archive of the experience of the pandemic. Our dance which is a riff on "Impossible Dance" begins around 36:40.
This Quiet Gathering is an online group contemplation and making practice that is evolving from participatory performance practices begun in The Quiet Circus. Click here to read the score.
The Quiet Circus took place every week for 15 months at the Washington Avenue Pier along the Delaware river in South Philadelphia. Dancing and contemplation happened in different ways through three overlapping programs that invited audiences to return again and again to observe and participate and create. Weekly scores evolved through the participation of newcomers. The videos below provide overviews of the programs. The project gave birth to The Quiet Circus blog: a conversation about art as experience and as a form of thinking predicated on the agency of those who touch it.
Experience and Reflection is a video about The Quiet Circus. It is the closest thing to a bird’s eye view of this sprawling artwork with its multiple layers, phases, and programs.
Quiet Circus River Charrettes. Collaborations with Eiko Otake, Billy Dufala, Martha McDonald and my mom, Carolyn Brick happened along the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers in an underground swimming pool, a former super-fund clean-up site, and the historic gardens of Bartram’s Garden and Andalusia.
Experience and Reflection. We spent a lot of time in Dunkin’ Donuts. It was the nearest bathroom and there was coffee and sugar. After the Saturday performances we invited the audience and participants to meet up at the Double D to share experiences and I always loved the noisy kerfuffle after the contemplative journey of two hours in the landscapes and scores of The Quiet Circus. The halting awkwardness as we came to language after a long silence was quite beautiful, underscoring as it did a feeling of “being alone, together.”
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