Works from the Woods
Image by Becca Webb.
For Scylla
For Scylla is an evening-length ensemble work created collaboratively with five performers: Natalie Border, Jonathan Kim, Tara McArthur, Morgan Phillips, and Melissa Younker. The 55-minute work premiered in REDUCER, the first production by The Woods Dance Project, June 2024 in Salt Lake City, Utah.
For Scylla questions authenticity, in both private and public spaces, and it says YES—over and over again—allowing desire to drive the reality of the work.
As the piece evolved, a sensuous, cautious, brave, animal energy emerged from the group. I enjoyed how the dancers changed characters but still offered the same images of hero and creature, challenge and loss, individual and whole. -Kara Komarnitsky for loveDANCEmore, 2024
Image by Becca Webb.
Volcano
Volcano, performed by Natalie Border and Jonathan Kim, is a meditation on the potential inside of quietude. Set to a spacious piano piece by Michael Wall, the 18-minute duet suspends time as the dancers tread carefully around a climax that never arrives. This work emerged from a gentle place and a desire to accept what is. Volcano premiered in REDUCER, the first production by The Woods Dance Project, in June, 2024.
Their close attention to the music slowed down time and turned the work into a trio, with the piano as another partner in the dance. -Kara Komarnitsky for loveDANCEmore, 2024
independent works + Commissions
Choreography by Nichele Woods with the performers
A decade+ of dances
Image by MotionVivid.
The End of Sisyphus
The End of Sisyphus is an evening-length ensemble work created for five performers: Natalie Border, Lyndi Coles, Brian Gerke, E’lise Jumes, and Tyler Orcutt. Serving as my M.F.A. thesis concert, the 45-minute performance premiered December 2018 in Salt Lake City, Utah.
The End of Sisyphus emerged from questions about our most basic human motivations, in particular the understanding and fear that humans have of their own mortality…
Image by MotionVivid.
Stranger Kin
Stranger Kin premiered in 2017 at Gibney in NYC, supported through Doug Varone’s Devices program. Created with performers Brian Gerke and Breeanne Saxton, the 12-minute duet was later reset on Gerke and Chang (Leo) Liu (2018). Queering heteronormative expectations, Stranger Kin is a study in power dynamics and intimacy.
"Stranger Kin disregards the aesthetics of cis-genders in an exhaustive, visceral exploration, and irresistibly lays bare questions of human intimacy, relativity, and power." - ACDA Northwest Region Conference adjudicators, 2018
Image by Sharon Kain.
F l o o d
It was an exhilarating pleasure to create Flood for Repertory Dance Theatre's spring concert, CURRENT. Developed with seven artists of the company over the course of five days during the summer of 2017, the work finally made its way to the stage for its premiere April 12-14, 2018. Set to a haunting score by Anna Þorvaldsdóttir, the work careened with physical tension.
"[The dancers] were often on the edge of physical stability, twisting themselves with movement overlapping and interweaving dynamically, likewise putting me on the edge of the seat beneath me." -Emmett Wilson for loveDANCEmore, 2018