The Triptych Collective is a group of performance artists interested in bringing a unique blend of live music, dance performance and visual art to non-traditional spaces in order to make thought-provoking and socially-engaged performance art more widely accessible.
“Traces” is a compilation of Triptych Collective works-in-progress for the Fall 2014 season. The show features work by Collective artists Reba Bowens, Sarah Ingel, Caitlyn Swett, and Eric Mullis and also features Hectorina’s performance musical “Collywobble.” “Traces” was performed Thursday, November 20, 2014, at Neighborhood Theatre in Charlotte, NC. Each of the artists writes about her or his piece below.
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“Traces,” from the November 20, 2014 show:
The Artists:
Sarah Ingel
Must make much much much more more more effort
Observing popular culture trends surrounding reality television and celebrity culture, society has developed an overwhelming need to build people up only to see them fall. With accessibility to the details of peoples lives at an all time high, our need to know more has become a staple of our society. Gossip, positive or negative, feeds our desire to become part of the world of the notable and notorious. But when our feelings of curiosity outweigh our feelings of empathy, an act of dehumanization occurs. We all exist with an internal world and an external world, but what happens when these worlds overlap? Must make much much much more more more explores the effects of our consumer culture, the need to know, provide, and iconize information about our internal worlds, and the consequences these cravings have on the individuals of our affections. When does private become public? When does this conflict of worlds turn a person into a battleground of confusion, depression, ego, and alter ego? How does our desire encounter our embarrassment of our desires and result in a revelation of who we truly are? These queries, and much much much more more more, have fueled the movement scores and improvisational structures that make up a piece dedicated to depicting our struggle with the division and intersection between our own public and private selves. “Do you wanna see me be her?” –Marilyn Monroe
Caitlyn Swett
[untitled]
I have been very lucky to experience a variety of different creative processes, ways of creating dance, and working with many different themes and conceptual content. Even in my own work, I have felt that each creative process has been significantly different from the last. Perhaps it is the collaborative nature of Triptych Collective’s work that produces a diverse repertory, thus presenting many different experiences through dance. This season, instead of being able to say “this piece is about (insert concept here),” the ideas I have been working with, both conceptually and aesthetically, have developed and unfolded into something different and unexpected. Though the movement was generated around ideas of silence and conversation, through this process I have given myself the permission to create a work in which the movement is enjoyable to perform, view, and experience. My collaborators and I have had many conversations about the way that we connect to the piece and with each other when performing. I am interested what connections an audience makes, how this may differ from the connections we are making, and how an audience digests and responds to a work without the lens of a concrete idea or story that a choreographer may place upon them. I am interested in how I can create a thoughtful piece that evokes conversation and asks questions without having a piece be “about” a single thing. Further, I am interested in the responses, conversations, and possibilities that can come from a “lens-less” way of viewing dance.
Reba Bowens
Finding My Voice
After writing a short blog about my development in capoeira, a Brazilian martial art created by slaves combining music, dance, acrobatics and other aspects of Brazilian culture, I began to think about my relationship or my connection to creating movement. I was questioning what movement means to me and understanding how my movement vocabulary has changed since being more immersed in capoeira. Is my desire to create movement something of a spiritual or therapeutic release for me? This question has and I think will continue to plague me not only as a dancer but as a capoeirista, capoeira practitioner. The first draft of this piece will be shown on November 20th at the Neighborhood Theatre along with other work presented by members of the Triptych Collective, XOXO Ensemble, Sinergismo, and Hectorina’s “Collywobble.” This piece is a personal reflection that will be continued to possibly include at least one or two dancers, and a live or recorded reading of excerpts from journals of my thoughts and feeling in understanding my movement.
Eric Mullis
Later Rain
This work is my second collaboration with XOXO Theater director Matt Cosper. Matt and I collaborated on Animus in the spring of 2014 and decided to start a new project in the summer. We reflected on our own experiences with ecstatic religion and began to research the history of the Pentecostal Holiness movement in America. We are interested by the fact that ekstasis can be found in religions around the world and in popular culture as well (festivals, holidays, etc.) and want to explore how losing control of the body and self is understood in different social contexts. For example, it is interesting that the Holiness movement sees being filled with the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues as signs of divine presence whereas other mainstream Christian denominations are wary about those beliefs and experiences. This is just one example of howekstasis is interpreted in different ways by different people in different cultural traditions. We are hoping that Later Rain will encourage audiences to consider the relationship between ekstasis and broader social values.
Creative Thresholds 
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