From Toward Being, a shared evening with Spacetime Dance and Uprooted Dance (2019)
Soundscape by Katie C. Sopoci Drake
“Navigating the Firing Field” is a work that is performed with eyes closed. It uses improvisational scores and set movement to explore the vulnerability and tenderness of a body in space as it navigates in the dark. The dancers were directed to find each other by sound and touch, and to navigate by memory. I began by examining the comfort found in familiar spaces and ended up reading into the neuroscience behind navigation.
Firing Field: a region where place cells (neurons in the hippocampus) exhibit a high firing rate. Firing fields are thought to provide a "cognitive map" of specific places in our environment.
Spacetime Suite (premiered in its entirety September 29-30, 2016 at Dance Loft on 14 in D.C.) explores the connections between astrophysical phenomena and human relationships. The creation of Spacetime Suite is the creative arm of Katie’s heuristic research on Laban’s theories of the flow effort, his theories on its psychophysical manifestations and Sopoci Drake’s specific theories on their connection to 4-dimensional space that she’s been developing since 2009.
This is an exploration of a previous piece titled The Lady Lovibond which was set on the students of Broward College. Rise will take the original idea and expand it using professional dancers.
"State Change" was a long-distance collaboration between Mountain Empire Performance Collective and Beth Elliott Dance Group. Awakening was featured in the evening length show Topographies: Dances for Land, Air, and Water on Nov 17-18, 2018 at Dance Loft on 14 in Washington, DC. Awakening is a series of vignettes juxtaposing civilization and nature.