Fragmented Multiplicity
Fragmented Multiplicity, the culmination of a yearslong thesis creation process, layers movement, an original music composition performed live, video projection, and text for a multi-modal experience. The work is crafted around the idea that perhaps time and space aren’t things that we have or are situated in but are concepts that we co-craft with, in, and through every moment. The collaboratively devised work offers threads of questions, feelings, responses, and curiosities for viewers to weave together into their own experience. The creation of this project was supported by grant funding received from New York Humanities, a SUNY-wide initiative.
Fleeting and Unfolding
Filmed on the shores of Lake Eerie, this atmospheric work explores the tactile and sensory relationships between bodies (both human and nonhuman). Fleeting and Unfolding was created in collaboration with five undergraduate members of the University at Buffalo’s pre-professional dance company, Zodiaque, in the Fall of 2021. Using improvisational structures, guiding imagery and a foundational attention to breath as a connecting force, the dancers explore their relationship to site. Fleeting and Unfolding encourages viewers to slow down and experience the textures, patterns, and inherent movement of a Lake Eerie beach alongside the dancers on screen.
we can not waste time, only ourselves
We can not waste time, only ourselves is a dance film created with the belief that words can not account for the ways bodies know/feel/sense the liminality of presence. Situated at the boundaries between winter and spring, stillness and motion, indoors and outdoors, visibility and obscurity, this film materializes the precarity of becoming. Tracing a body through a somatic experience, this piece asks: where might somatic curiosity lead? What can be learned from attending to the body when it is subsumed into the world’s constant ongoing flow? “We can not waste time, only ourselves” blurs and throws off balance the boundaries between self and world, positing that there is no “outside,” there is no “away.” We (all material things) are part of a matrix of intra-activity. We can not waste time, only ourselves was presented at the University at Buffalo’s first dance for film concert, Shutterspeed, in the spring of 2021. The work was also shared at the Theatre and Performance Research Association’s annual conference where Meg discussed the research supporting the piece and the development process.
Artist Residency at Homestead National Park
In July of 2021 Meg was the first ever dance Artist in Residence at Homestead National Park. During the two week residency, Meg created site-specific dance works in the park that explored the overlapping cultural and ecological histories of the park. At the end of her stay, Meg presented a public program where the audience was invited to join Meg in a guided somatic experience and view some of the works Meg created while at the park. The excerpt below is one example of site-specific dance studies Meg made while in residence.
Again
This Screendance was created in collaboration with four undergraduate dancers at The University at Buffalo during the fully remote Fall semester of 2020. The cast of Again rehearsed and filmed the work over zoom. Dealing with themes of isolation and the monotony of a daily existence stuck on repeat, Again invites in the audience into intimate proximity with the dancers. This work was presented at Home and Away, a University at Buffalo production and at the 2021 Dumbo Dance Festival in New York City.
Lakes and Bodies
Lakes and Bodies is a creative research project that began in the Summer of 2020. Through the creation of this peice and an accompanying essay Meg explored ways of physicalizing a posthuman sense of becoming and transposing those sense experiences into langague that does not rely on hierarchy and binaries. Breath, touch and witnessing are touchstones of this work and continue to inform Meg’s posthuman somatic praxis.
Far Afield
This small group work was presented as a live performance in the MFA showcase at the University at Buffalo in the Fall of 2019. Rehearsals for Far Afield were held outside, to allow the movement to be responsive to the environment. An important part of the process was negotiating how to bring this work inside and present it on a stage while maintaining the integrity of movement initially created with the environment.
SplitScreen
Splitscreen is a cross-country collaboration between Theatre Artist Sterling Melcher, and Dance Artist Meg Kirchhoff that premiered simultaneously in the Minnesota and Philadelphia Fringe Festivals in 2019. With one artist in Philadelphia and the other in Minneapolis, the two performances were connected with live video, allowing for interactions between the two audiences and distanced performers. Created with support from Springboard for the Arts and the Minnesota Hinge Artist Residency Program, Splitscreen stages the entangling of memory that happens in long-lasting friendships. Splitscreen‘s premier predates the pandemic but anticipated some of the questions that circulate in the COVID era–what does it mean to share space? How do we create and maintain meaningful connections in the contemporary moment of digital connection but social isolation?
Of Queens
This large group work explores the iconography of the Queen cards of Tarot decks in four sections. The movement for this work was crafted collaboratively with the dancers using imagery, improvisational structures, and reflection prompts. Of Queens was presented at the Minnesota Fringe Festival as part of an evening of original modern dance works curated by a collective of local dance artists.
Meg Kirchhoff Singh 