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. 

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.

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!