● What Even is This?
The Part where we try to explain ourselves
I’d Rather Be Dancing lives somewhere between a performance, a conversation, and a confession. The piece moves through memory, grief, humor, devotion, and the strange ways we keep performing even when life feels like it’s cracking underneath us.
The work blends dance theater, recorded text, improvisation, and heavily scored physical moments to create something that feels both deeply intimate and slightly absurd. One second we are unraveling in front of you, the next we are making each other laugh so hard we can barely continue.
Rather than telling a linear story, the piece invites the audience into a shifting emotional landscape—one built from repetition, vulnerability, physical exhaustion, tenderness, and the ongoing question of what it means to keep showing up for life, for art, and for each other.
At its core, I’d Rather Be Dancing is about choosing movement anyway.
Where It Became Real
The first draft of I’d Rather Be Dancing was brought to life in Brooklyn at Casa Duse — complete with an original sound score, recorded text, improvisation, and the strange emotional chaos the work was built from.
What we shared was roughly half of the show’s final intended length, and for the first time we got to feel the piece breathe with a live audience in the room. The response honestly surprised us. People laughed, cried, stayed after talking, hugged strangers, and kept repeating some version of “I’ve never seen something that felt quite like that before.”
More than anything, the showing proved to us that this world we’ve been building actually connects. The piece feels alive now. Bigger than us. And we are incredibly excited to continue growing it into its full length form.
What’s next?
The Monster Gets Bigger
The next step for I’d Rather Be Dancing is expanding the work into its full intended form: a full evening length, two act production that pushes the emotional and physical world of the piece even further.
We want to build a larger scale version of the universe we have already begun — one with a more immersive set, expanded production elements, deeper theatrical design, and an additional dancer woven into the work’s constantly shifting relationships and emotional landscape.
The goal is to develop the piece into a weekend long run where audiences can fully sink into the strange, funny, devastating, and deeply human rhythm of the show. We are interested in creating something that feels intimate in emotion but ambitious in scale — a dance theater experience that leaves people feeling like they witnessed something both incredibly personal and impossibly large at the same time.
At its heart, the mission remains the same: make something honest enough that people see parts of themselves inside it.
Wait there’s more?
Beyond the live production, the long term dream for I’d Rather Be Dancing is to transform the piece into a dance film that allows the world of the show to become even more immersive, surreal, and emotionally detailed.
The film version would lean fully into maximalism — bedrooms overflowing with objects, textures, memories, clothes on chairs, half finished thoughts, strange collections, tiny visual jokes, and the kind of overwhelming emotional clutter that says everything before a single word is spoken. We want the environments to feel deeply lived in, almost intrusive, like the audience has stepped directly inside someone’s nervous system.
Through film, the smallest nuances of the piece can suddenly become enormous: a shaking hand, eye contact held a second too long, the texture of exhaustion, lipstick smeared across a mirror, dancing alone at 2am in a room that feels too full and too empty at the same time. The goal is not simply to document the stage version, but to completely expand the emotional language of the work through cinematic visuals, intimacy, and scale.
Ultimately, we hope to bring the film to dance film festivals across the world and continue building a project that exists across multiple forms — live performance, film, movement, sound, and visual art — while still holding onto the raw humanity at the center of it all.
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