Co-creation Hadley Smith/Johanna S. Meyer

Johanna S. Meyer is a New York City choreographer, performer and educator. Her four full-length dance works include Every Hotel TV Plays On, Teaser, piece.piece, and MAPS; she has also created 18 short pieces. Comedic and intricate, her dances often draw on historical material such as burlesque routines, medical textbooks, and vintage films, and build collages of abstract, rigorous theatrical moments woven through physicality and character.

Hadley Smith is a New York based dance artist. Her work deals generally with systems of order, and in particular with the schematics of gender. She seeks to disorder the structures of power written upon our bodies through visceral and absurdist action. Hadley’s choreographic practice is strongly influenced by her work in other disciplines; her slide-shows, meditation tapes and zines can be found at hadleysmithdance.com and @sublime_materiality on Instagram.

Hadley has presented work in New York, Chicago and Toronto. In 2016 she graduated with an MFA in Dance from the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. Most recently she presented a first edition of ongoing project 1000 Moves for Back Up Dancers at Danspace in 2019 and released SSTEMS: the zines in Spring of 2021.

Hadley Smith and Johanna S. Meyer have worked together for 12 years in different capacities and this performance marks their first co-creation. The work is an experiment made with improvised scores and set material, performed both live and online, using rudimentary Zoom features. The artists are framing this work through the “eye” of the computer camera for detail and perspective, while performing the dance in person and outside at the same time. Their work together foregrounds fragile technology and a fluid femininity between screen and body.

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