Thea Patterson

Thea Patterson

Opleiding
DAS Choreography
Lichting
2016

“The whole time I’ve been building my audience I’ve also been trying to unbuild the walls that come with having an audience, with having power. The whole point is to be able to feel more, to connect more, and yet in some ways having power runs at cross-purposes to this. Maybe I feel more just by sitting with a friend. And can I make a career, as a filmmaker and performer, that makes this sitting-with-a-friend feeling more possible, for each member of the audience and for myself? Yes! I say yes.”
- Miranda July

Description of research interest, aim and questions

As an author/choreographer, can I create a dialogue between myself, the performers and the viewer within a lateral field of sharing that frames both the ‘creation event’ and the ‘performance event’ as conversation(s) and brings these usually separate spheres within the same frame? I am asking how to be the author, how to be the performer, and how to be with an audience.  More precisely: what does it mean to be an author who shares a space with the performers, and the viewer in a way that both acknowledges and stretches the parameters of these relationships?  Perhaps it is possible to engage with a viewer that allows us to forget for a moment that we meet within the context of a performance? Perhaps it is possible for a performer to direct the viewer and vise versa. Perhaps it is possible to forget who is the author and challenge the notions of power and privilege attached to the position of AUTHOR/CHOREOGRAPHER.

In sharing the responsibility for work-creation and performance I intend to foreground the vulnerability of the role of ‘author’ and allow the fragile act of constructing work to become the performance itself. The work will be the making of the work, contingent on both the performers and the viewer as integral to its becoming form.

Short biography
Montreal based Thea Patterson works on a variety of projects as a choreographer, dramaturge, rehearsal director and performer. She is the long time collaborator of Peter Trosztmer, for whom she was dramaturge over the course of five critically acclaimed solos. Prior to this Thea created ‘Rhyming Couplets’ (08) and ‘A Soft Place to Fall’ (06)' which was made into a BravoFACT film and continues to screen at international film festivals. She is currently practicing a new solo work entitled “the dance that I cannot do” which was presented at Movement Research at the Judson Church in New York and as part of the Third Floor Series in Montreal. Thea began her Master in Choreography at the Amsterdam School of the Arts in September 2014.

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