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ReVUE

Atmospheric and spectacular, ReVUE is an explosion of sexuality, gender politics, and darkly fantastical themes—pushing societal boundaries and eluding traditional expectations of dance. all that glitters...

Runtime- 60 minutes

5 Performers

World Premiere- 2010, Kelly Strayhorn Theater (Pittsburgh, PA)

Production, Lighting, & Décor by Amith Chandrashaker

 

“2010 Best in Dance”

“It was a ReVUE unlike any other, a blend of vaudeville, Fellini, and Cirque du Soleil. Ms. Bell proved that she had her finger on the future of dance where ballet and hip-hop coexist on the same plane.” - Pittsburgh Post Gazette

STELLA

STELLA is a series of dramatically theatrical scenes and manifestos which explore ideas of the self, private space, consent, voyeurism, hero workship, blind belief and participation: dark and probing, fantastical and romantic, the work demands both physical power and tender expressiveness from Bell’s crack ensemble of fearless and technically honed dancers. cult of me...

Runtime- 40 minutes

5 Performers

World Premiere- 2012, Baruch Performing Arts Center (NYC)

Production, Lighting, & Décor by Amith Chandrashaker

 

"In STELLA, fantasy morphs into the grotesque and the grostesque breeds fantasy. The androgynous dancers spew a highly kinetic and gestural movement language, with their capable bodies and overtly cirque-like prowess, at warp speed to a beat I hoped the DJ wouldn’t stop. The jaw-dropping solos and duets reminiscent of the famous ‘walks’ at a vogue ball (aka Paris is Burning), stunning ballet technique, the ecstasy of all-night clubbing felt through the 4th wall, and the dread of the inevitable morning or end to the show came together in a seemingly unreal and jam-packed hour of dance." -DIY Dancer

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​"The ensemble dances in a relatively shallow space across the gallery and gets up close to front-row folks in ways that heighten the persistent air of tension, risk and thrill. There are the crisp rhythms of street dance, the stark, deep-queer glamour of a fashion catwalk, the enigmatic drama that just does not quit. Bell calls upon a seemingly limitless supply of intricate movement ideas and shows no hesitation to share this largesse. And, from start to finish, her disciplined crew is ON IT. Video closeups amplify the unfiltered anxiety with performers staring into the camera and repeatedly tugging or clawing at their own bare flesh for reasons that remain mysterious. As for STELLA, she simply blasts herself into The Met Breuer and makes her formidable presence felt." - InfiniteBody by writer Eva Yaa Asantewaa 

Unidentifiable; Bodies

Unidentifiable; Bodies is a beating heart and is the third in a trilogy of works, including Nudity and .heterogamy, that  deal with identity, intimacy, and existence. It amplifies Bell's high voltage movement language and navigates terrain that is fragile, preternatural, and ephemeral. Bell mirrors and physically orchestrates universal systems like stars colliding and matter exploding to reproduce emergent forms in the body. The work moves past cultural signifiers and arbitrary assignments to reclaim the body's essentialism, universality, and a sense of otherness. It looks at the theater of the body, phenomenon, and its mysterious syndromes. Bell explores relativity and duration to create a superreal landscape of images that offer multiple viewing experiences. emergent bodies burning brightly...

Runtime- 90 minutes

5 Performers

World Premiere- 2015, Baruch Performing Arts Center (New York, NY)

Production, Lighting, & Décor by Amith Chandrashaker

Costume Design & Creative Direction: David Flores Productions/Gilbert Small/Caitlin Taylor

 

"The effect is both androgynous and sexual, anonymous and exposing, which reflects a movement vocabulary that is simultaneously beastly and made mechanical through precision and repetition, executed with an energy that almost seems inhuman in its sustained exertion. The effort is relentless, and they do it with conviction and prowess.”- Irene Hsiao of SF Weekly

MÖNSTER OUTSIDE

In MÖNSTER OUTSIDE, Sidra Bell has joined forces with innovative Swedish composer Per Störby and his critically acclaimed chamber ensemble New Tide Orquesta, and dynamic design team Amith Chandrashaker & Amy Rubin, to develop a flexibly voyeuristic discourse and commentary about the nature of outliers in contemporary society. This fine art piece marries dance theater, chamber music, projection mapping, vocal scoring, and scenic and lighting design.  It locates and depicts aspects of human joy and despair via the experience of the “outsider".  furiously dancing question marks, lost boys & girls, anti-climactic humans... 1000 tomorrows

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Runtime- 70 minutes

World Premiere- November 2017

Live Music by New Tide Orquesta (Sweden)

Creative Director & Lighting by Amith Chandrashaker

Set Design by Amy Rubin

Costume Design by Caitlin Taylor

 

“innovative”- TimeOut New York

F R I C T I O N

F R I C T I O N has no echo, tries to hard and is detached from the action. A personal navigation of loneliness, causality,  aimlessness, gratification, social codes, filters, disguises, vanities and contemporary narcissism.  Highlighted by a  live music collaboration with electronic dynamo KRONODIGGER who plays onstage.

every dog deserves a fight... let it burn (friction is a fiction)

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World Premiere- 2018, New York Live Arts (New York, NY)

Production, Lighting, & Décor by Amith Chandrashaker

Original Music & Live Performance by Alexey Gorokholinsky KRONODIGGER

Costume Design by Jeni O'Malley (special assistance from Caitlin Taylor)

 

"Bell's worlds are singular--even when colliding with the worlds of Pina Bausch, fashion and Harlem's ballrooms, as they do here. They fold and contort as much as Sebastian Abarbanell's (dancer) uncanny body. They are as ridiculously opulent as an extravagant hotel. It's hard not to cheer Bell on when you see all these things laid out just right and danced to perfection by this crew. You don't get dancers more weirdly excellent--and let me underscore, here, both *weird* and *excellent*--than Bell's troupe. That's not to say that the audacity and stylishness of Bell's entire interdisciplinary aesthetic isn't brilliant and impressive and even hypnotically seductive. It is." - InfiniteBody by writer Eva Yaa Asantewaa

L O S T L A N G U A G E

L O S T L A N G U A G E is a kind of retelling of Old Mother Hubbard, a playpen, and a live collaboration with electronic sound artist and Juilliard trained clarinetist Alexey Gorokholinsky. This evening length abstraction archives the stories, memories, and histories embedded in the bodies of the performers and physicalizes that stored information to illustrate a mysterious and ambiguous landscape of images. A rumination that looks at restoring buried, intuitive languages of the body, mothering, crawling again, and at relearning our inner baby. our age of innocence...

Runtime- 85 minutes

5 Performers

World Premiere- 2016, Baruch Performing Arts Center (New York, NY)

Production, Lighting, & Décor by Amith Chandrashaker

Original Music & Live Performance by Alexey Gorokholinsky KRONODIGGER

Costume Design by Caitlin Taylor

 

"inventively quirky and sensuously muscular" - The Boston Globe

 

POOL

The slick, stark tableaux of POOL and its surrealist nightscape is a dystopia of grotesquerie, anime, and decadence. Bell's distinctive and hyperkinetic movement creates and deconstructs an imagined Eden and examines the suspension between Heaven and Hell, a descent into darkness. Vincent Vigilante creates the palette for this illusory, neon, and phantasmic world, carving out sharply-delineated zones and ovular pockets of space, evocative of mirrors or exits. It develops with radically different temperatures and through the principal male couple we observe breathing, sinking, floating, inhaling, gasping and ultimately surrendering. I will drink you in, drown in every drop, burn while you fiddle, dancing on my heart...

Runtime- 40 minutes

World Premiere- 2011, Dance Theater Workshop (New York, NY)

Lighting Design by Vincent Vigilante

Costume Design by Alexandra Johnson

 

"putrid, beautiful, freakish" -Lisa Jo Sagolla, Backstage

 

 

garment

garment is a playful jaunt that attempts to rescue the individual by constructing a world that navigates popular zeitgeists. Conceived through materials the work exercises small performance ceremonies to observe identity, appropriation, code switching, transfiguration, nonsense, influence, authorship, and reformation. Teach Me Teacher. you'll be remembered...###

Runtime- 60 minutes

World Premiere- 2014, Kelly Strayhorn Theater (Pittsburgh, PA)

Production, Lighting, & Décor by Amith Chandrashaker

 

"Named #1 in Contemporary Dance in 2014" 

"The New York choreographer wowed the audience in a thought-provoking piece focused on identity. Her company members were some of the most unique and talented artists I had ever seen, and her choreography exploded with creativity." - Pittsburgh Examiner

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Nudity

Nudity evinces a love affair with formalism, utility, focus, rigor, and regimen. In this evening length work one's imagination is turned upside down in an unabashed tribute to robust, majestic, austere, regimen, and voracious material. The fastidious and spartan purgatory puts five bodies on display, brazenly promoting their anatomy, and thereby revealing their insides. Form begets deep sensations that resonate and vibrate for the spectator. show me the code to your padlock, your secret is safe with me...

Runtime- 40 minutes

World Premiere- 2012, ODC Theater (San Francisco, CA)

Production, Lighting, & Décor by Amith Chandrashaker

Costume by Alexandra Johnson

 

"Notable Performances of 2012- The Year in Review" 

"Perhaps the most profound gift that Tanz Farm has offered to the Atlanta community, so far, has been to present Sidra Bell Dance New York. Bell’s dancers brought a concentration of immediacy and edge to her new work, Nudity. The quintet created a personal yet formally conceived world where imperfections help define human beauty" - ArtsATL

.heterogamy

.heterogamy is an unsexy, pastoral, aimless meditation. a humorless study on disparate minds in limbo, fractured souls, the art of actualizing, and behavior reproduced. i exist...

Runtime- 26 minutes (Nudity's sister work)

5 Performers

World Premiere- 2013, Dance Place (Washington, DC)

Production, Lighting, & Décor by Amith Chandrashaker

 

"Bell's company has completely mastered an aloof tenor. The hip rolls, paranoid skittering and balletic leg extensions in .heterogamy were executed with an apathetic gaze that was at once creepy and comical. - Washington Post

Grief Point.

Grief Point. is a solo that looks at the psychology of an artist's mind and the anxiety that arises from the creative process. The soloist shifts between contemplations, each moment separated by an eclipse of light. These eclipses enhance the feeling that they are excavating the deepest aspects of their mind in a stream of consciousness. They question and doubt their ability to create and thereby communicate, which leaves them feeling empty and isolated. I should only make things I understand. I should only make things I know how to construct, however imperfect...I think the world does not like me grim. It likes me melancholic, but not miserable...

Runtime- 8 minutes

World Premiere- 2011, Solo Tanz Theatre Festival (Stuttgart, Germany)

Production, Lighting, & Décor by Amith Chandrashaker

 

1st Preis/Prize Choreographie/Choreography  (Sidra Bell) & Tanz/Dancer (Moo Kim) at the International Solo Tanz Theatre Festival in Stuttgart, Germany (2011)

CONDUCTIVITY

Conductivity is a deeply introspective solo that looks at the mirrors of a man's mind and the reflectiveness and disquieting that occurs when one no longer recognize themselves. It is a piece about recognition and tranformation. The original text by actor/writer illuminates the journey that the soloist and collaborator Shamel Pitts takes in the exhaustive and trancendental work. You’ve done something, to your face, your hair, your hands... Something’s happened to your wrists. How lovely How glorious. How sudden. How unlike you . . .

Runtime- 12 minutes

World Premiere- 2009, Baryshnikov Arts Center (NYC)

Production, Lighting, & Décor by Amith Chandrashaker

 

2nd Preis/Prize Tanz/Dancer (Shamel Pitts) at the International Solo Tanz Theatre Festival in Stuttgart, Germany (2009)

 

new demon

n e w d e m o n a short exercise (facilitated)

World Premiere-2014, Kelly Strayhorn Theater (Pittsburgh, PA) and Tanz Farm (Atlanta, GA)

Runtime- 12 minutes

Production, Lighting, & Décor by Amith Chandrashaker

 

"extraordinary physical language"- Atlanta INtown Paper

Cinematography by PopovMedia by Alex Popov with Alexey Gorokholinsky & Breeanah Tre'chelle Breeden, Joshua Bee Alafia, Chris Randle, Sarah Paulson, Moving Angel, Ricardo Iamuuri

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