WATER MOVES

Amelia Rudolph’s WATER MOVES is an intimate, multimedia dance experience exploring water as element, resource, and life force. Centered on the body as a vessel, the work uses movement,  experimental rigging, projection, sculpture, and sound, to explore how we are moved by the aqueous forces that sustain us.

Three Nights Only: May 7, 8, and 9 6:30PM at San Francisco’s Joe Goode Annex

Tickets, $50, $35

(Artist discount tickets available upon request)

Known globally for her pioneering work in vertical dance, Rudolph returns to the theater to explore our relationship to water—through the body as vessel.  While referencing the ecology of our changing world and our connections to each other the main focus is on movement itself. How can the aqueous body act as a conduit for energy, momentum, and change as dancers navigate choreography of suspension and counterbalance—at times with lolling restraint and at other times splashing into flight.

Rudolph is joined by creative collaborators: composer Luke Mombrea, sculptor Todd Laby, and artist/animator Andrew Lyndon, whose multi-disciplinary insights help shape the world of the piece. Mombrea’s sound palette ranges from hydrophone recordings to sampled Handel and driving club beats. Laby’s kinetic sound sculpture brings a steam-punk-meets-gramophone twist while Lyndon’s projection surrounds the dance in abstracted arid landscapes and fluid light. The three dimensional atmosphere is enhanced by Tristan Fabiunke’s lighting design, which translates the optical qualities of water—refraction, depth, and clarity—into a theatrical setting. Featuring a strong ensemble of Bay Area-based dancers: Faith Elder, B Dean, Clarissa Dyas, Olivia Sander, Ciarra D’Onofrio, and Kris Rulifson bring both the kinetic and symbolic currents of the work to life. 

A New Direction for Rudolph

While Rudolph is celebrated for the "public art" scale of her previous ventures with BANDALOOP, the company she founded, WATER MOVES marks a deliberate turn to an intimate setting where proximity to the dancers heightens the audience’s attention to breath, weight, and material inviting a more potent encounter between viewer and performer.  

"Water lives in our bodies as life force, memory, momentum and vulnerability,” says Rudolph. “WATER MOVES is an exploration of water as our elemental source, delivered through sensation —an invitation to feel what it means to be suspended within forces larger than ourselves.”