Through a system of choices, Open Machine explores the survey and navigation of dancing bodies in public spaces. Dancers travel through urban architectures and outdoor, remote environments outfitted with participatory scores. Performers direct and interpret these exterior journeys, layering them into a multi-sensory tapestry of movement, visualization, audio description, and music. Paths converge into a dynamic choreography for the stage that reimagines live gathering, decision-making, and our influence on an increasingly mediated and rapidly changing world. 

Failure Party - a dance improvisation workshop

What environment do we need to be able to fail? How do we create those conditions? How do we allow it to be a gateway to the next thing? Failure, in a positive light, is a part of learning and building curiosity about how to achieve something. It requires honoring experimentation and allowing the unexpected to guide our next move.

This workshop is open to all. No prior dance experience needed. The beginning of our time will be dedication to warming up ourselves and our environment via guided practices that offer movement, listening and breath as our impulses. The second half will be devoted to an open practice failure party score where all our unique curiosities will be thrown into the pot towards an unknown outcome. 

Double Feature with works by zay thurgood & dani derks and Christy Funsch

dani and zay take on a brand new collab with their debut performance, between a rock and a soft place. The work will explore the edges of impulse, hope, desire, tension, and inescapable tenderness. 

Set List (2025) collides two of Funsch Dance’s works-in-progress from 2024: PastPerfect, created in the spring in San Francisco, and experimental shards made throughout New York State over the summer. Set List careens through the debris fields of the two processes, nourishing vestigial desires from these past explorations. The past processes are embedded in the structure of the new work, where their tattered edges provide undercurrents of tension. Set Listis a work in conversation with its component parts. It values tangents over accumulation.

Improvisation, to Raven, is a means by which any human, of any age, any ability, any experience, can connect with their body and discover what expansive feelings and possibilities exist in themselves. She believes that learning to move with freedom, with ourselves, is world changing. Thus, Raven is devoted to bringing the possibility of movement and self acceptance to any who wishes to listen.

Sheshi is a duet between choreographer and interdisciplinary artist lily gold and her mother, with sound support from artist dani derks. Tuning to ancestral resilience and reviving parts lost to assimilation, their scores are transparent with tensions and explore family stories they’ve been told, as well as ones their bodies have begun to tell. While Sheshi rekindles reverence for elders it also embraces back-handed humor, working to coax exiled-aggression into balance. Leaning into play to tether the immensity of looking at ancestral trauma through a multi-generational lens, lily and Sheri offer their intimacies for resonance.

This will be Sheshi's first public in-progress showing, join us!

After an ample and enjoyable warmup that prioritises connection to self and others, we’ll get up to some juicy dancing that honors the individuals present and addresses some of my current choreographic and spiritual questions: For a witness/audience, what is the benefit offered by improvisational choice that is made from a place of not-choosing and radical withness; which prioritises pleasure, radiance, and responsiveness? How can we find and develop joy while doing the hard, sometimes deeply uncomfortable work of actually being at ease with ourself in offering ourself? We’ll get into these questions with the light aspiration to create a “something” together that brings each of us deeper inward and closer to each other.