Time: 60min
Space Needs: two chairs, general lighting, and two microphones if the space is large.
Available for touring venues, festivals, conferences, and meetings.
Altered States is a dance performance conversation between dancers and choreographers Zornitsa Stoyanova and Megan Bridge, where they move improvisationally while talking with each other.
Bridge and Stoyanova are both award-winning and critically acclaimed performers and choreographers. They are both women, mothers, and people who are perhaps obsessed with the concept of “presence” in performance. Collectively, they have spent more than thirty years researching this topic and gathering tools and methods for using “presence’. In this performance conversation, they propose that “performance presence” is, in fact, an altered state of consciousness. They discuss, demonstrate, and explore their own techniques, compositional tools, and physical practices, for creating altered states. Zornitsa and Megan’s performance suggests different ways of being in the world, challenging neuro-normative modes of perception and being. They center these “presencing” practices as survival tactics, or strategies to help navigate the dailyness/deadliness of everyday life.
Excerpt from our performance of Altered States at Etud Gallery in Sofia, Bulgaria. June 2021
Altered States has been performed in Fidget Space, Philadelphia, Temple University in Philadelphia, and Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania all through 2021 and 2022. The performance is unscripted and every single one is a different conversation on the topic of presence.
