

Built on a foundation of cross-medium, collaborative performance projects, my current work seeks to leverage technology's power to augment, amplify, and deliver contemporary dance experiences. Through theater, site-specific performances, media installations, virtual reality films, dance-themed computer games, and motion-tracking interactive projections, I continually explore how our bodies move within space and how those spaces hold our bodies. I seek alternative performance sites and platforms to challenge the norms of audience engagement and invite my collaborating artists, alongside our audiences, to explore the integration of art with the actions, tools, and locations of pedestrian life.
I approach my movement vocabulary with a tool kit of internal and external imagery that informs each step's mechanics, quality, and execution. I work with my dancers to secure a collaborative investigation of this imagery and position them to continue exploring, reinterpret, and play with the material in each repetition of the work.
For the last several years, I have collaborated with projection designer Dylan Uremovich to build a repertory of live performance projects that fuse my choreography with his motion-tracking interactive projections. In 2021-21, I pivoted my planned in-person events to virtual reality films in response to the global pandemic. The works are filmed with 360-degree cameras and then produced for audiences to watch with VR headsets. Within these virtual landscapes, where we question our experiences of perspective, interaction, and proximity, I find my most rich explorations of the definitions and interrelations of space, site, and body in performance. As we all return to live, in-person productions in 2021-22, I plan to concurrently use VR films as a core performance platform for my work.
S. J. Ewing & Dancers leverage technology's power to augment, amplify, and deliver contemporary dance experiences. They have received extensive support from CityDance, Dance Place, and CulturalDC to create and present new works throughout the District. In DC, they have presented at the Kennedy Center, Dance Place, Source Theatre, Dupont Underground, Atlas Performing Arts Center, Bread for the City, 2M, Flash Nightclub, and The Warehouse. The company has also completed residencies at Cranbrook School and Lightbox in Detroit. S. J. Ewing & Dancers has toured across the US to Green Space (NYC), Boston Contemporary Dance Festival (MA), White Wave Dance Festival (NYC), Ailey Citigroup Theater (NYC), Your Move JC (NJ), Dance Gallery Festival (TX), CityDance Studio Theater at Strathmore (MD), and Detroit City Dance Festival (MI), as well as the Mona Bismarck American Center for art & culture (Paris, France) and New Zealand's premier alternative arts festival, The Arcade (Wellington, NZ). This season they will return to Paris to be presented at Theatre Douze and to New Zealand's Performance Arcade through Mid Atlantic's USArtists International grant program, as well as premiering a new work in September in Washington, DC.
Photo Credit Maggie Picard