Six Acts of Witness

Participatory Event

2015

produced in collaboration with Jane Jerardi for Second Floor Rear 2015

Six Acts of Witness uses improvisation and active listening to consider vulnerability, intimacy, and collaboration as a response to the anxieties of daily life. Audience becomes performer in choreographed encounters in social spaces as a score moves participants through the space of an apartment and elicits a series of intimate acts performed with a partner—stranger or friend. 

Each participant offers statements—and in return, becomes witness to an other. Six Acts of Witness engages multiple modes of perception, multiple body parts, and multiple bodies.

How can we confront anxiety not as an individual psychological problem in isolation but as a public, and not one that seeks answers or remedies but to be heard and to be felt? How might we behold and be held?