against hard air

2019

choreography: Heather Stewart

music: dull

created with dancers: Alyx Henigman, Emily Jerant-Hendrickson, Jenna Pollack

visual and scenic collaborator: Will Farris

lighting deign: Harrison Pearse Burke

outside eye: Emily Gualtieri

costume design: Mitzi Eppley

length: 60 minutes

against hard air is a full-length contemporary dance work created by Heather Stewart. It is part of Heather’s ongoing collaboration with Montreal based composer dull. Inspired by images of vast, barren landscapes and abandoned, decaying houses against hard air explores debt and deficiency between three performers. Subjected to duration and physical rigor the performers inhabit a world that is at once barren and severe. Tenderness and deflation pierce moments of sharpness and hostility in both the auditory and visual landscape of the work.

Developed in collaboration with visual artist and writer Will Farris, lighting designer Harrison Pearse Burke, and dancers Emily Jerant-Hendrickson, Alyx Henigman, Jenna Pollack against hard air is about the way debt, shame, and culpability surrounds our needs and desires. The work examines the ways in which we fall short and the lengths we will go in order to reach gratification. The world of the performers is centralized on the crisis of both having a space that is capable of being filled and to also be, or occupy, empty space. They reach moments of trance and insistence through the embodiment of repetition and resilience.