ALPHA MARE

world premiere coming in spring 2027

ALPHA MARE is a new choreographic work from Heather Stewart/littlehouse that imagines a world without animals.

Setting animal life and death under a magnifying glass, this full-length contemporary dance work performed to an original soundscape by Courtney Swain flips through a collage of altars to the unmourned. Images of dirt and rot, flies and vultures, bruises and heartache expand, shrivel, nuzzle, grunt, and burst. Grief takes a seat alongside compassion and stays there for a while.

The world of ALPHA MARE considers the tension between cyclical and irreversible time: while life unfolds in seasons and generations, extinction is final. Once time runs out, there is no returning. The performers explore a landscape of forgotten antlers, searching for traces of what once was.

Taking the global crises of mass extinction, industrialized animal agriculture, and the widespread invisibility of animal suffering as its point of departure, ALPHA MARE asks what it means to remain present to a world that is vanishing before us. The work approaches animal death not as metaphor but as reality, offering visibility to lives that too often pass without acknowledgment.

ALPHA MARE is a dance about attention: how we witness our surroundings, mark loss, and acknowledge lives that often go unseen.

Credits

Concept, choreography, and direction: Heather Stewart

Composer: Courtney Swain

Dancer Collaborators: Taylor Butterfield, Isabel Hunter, Mia Muntu, Maddy Joss

Lighting and Technical Designer: Harrison Pearse Pollack

Presenting Partner: Mechanics’ Hall

Research & development for ALPHA MARE has been supported Villekula Farm, a farm and artist residency in rural Nebraska and Casco Bay Movers.