UNDERSTARS
MARCH 4 & 5 2022
Emerging from a time of profound isolation, loss, loneliness, and disconnection where our bodies are longing for touch, we speak to our enduring connection to one another despite what has felt like galactic-distances of space between us.
...Here, in this moment, we slowly remember the romantic language of human contact as we find each other under the stars.
This performance is UNDERSTARS is illuminated by The Pillow Project's original projected-light concepts first premiered live on the outdoor stage at Flagstaff Hill in Pittsburgh's Schenley Park as a part of the two-week OPEN AIR dance festival (August 2021)
DIRECTION & LIGHTING BY
Pearlann Porter
This project is made possible by support from
The Heinz Endowments Small Arts Initiative
THE GREEN SWAN
SPRING 2022
To be eternally bound in the ugliness of beauty...
or to be freed into the beauty of what is thought to be ugly...
THE GREEN SWAN is The Pillow Project's hyper-modernist tale of an enchanted princess under a spell of what is believed to be the quintessential idea of beauty. She has been transformed into something inhumanly artificial by day... only able to regain her true organic form at night in the depths of a swamp.
The only way for the spell to be permanently broken is by the power of someone who can truly be intrigued by her dirty, distorted movement and meet her 'in the jazz'. If he cannot see her unique bending of grace, she will remain imprisoned in a shallow aesthetic of beauty forever.
THE GREEN SWAN is an evening-length multimedia performance-installation (with live orchestrated music blending Classical with the highly-experimental) disrupting the concept of the Swan Lake ballet to challenge the notion of the classical ‘pas de deux’. This avant-garde magical reimagining is given new form in questioning the conventional metric of physical beauty by transitioning the notion of perceived ugliness into an intriguing organic unraveling of freedom. This fully-modern idea of a new ballet confronts the tradition-imposed idea of perfection and liberates the dancers in an unbound beauty for the modern age.
DIRECTED BY
Pearlann Porter
LIVE MUSIC BY
PJ Roduta, David Pellow, John Lambert, slowdanger
MUSIC BASED ON THE ORIGINAL SWAN LAKE SCORE BY
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
PERFORMED BY
Kylee Killian & Matthew Saggiomo
This project is made possible by support from
The Heinz Endowments Small Arts Initiative