“Moving through this rich network of imagery, the three demonstrate superb skill as dancers. Their vocabulary is imaginative, the articulation crisp. It’s a dance of beautiful invention that is a thrill to watch.” - The Friday Five
ABOUT
Wild Tongue explores how stories and language live in and spring from our bodies. Part autoethnography, part dance theatre, this evening length work reckons with ontologies of language and memory, teasing out stories that spill from bodies while reimagining them through playful juxtaposition of meaning. Activating the entirety of the theatrical space, choreographers Gillespie, Nguyên, and Williamson dance, speak, write, and juxtapose unique modes of storytelling. The trio confront and celebrate tensions among their multiple language systems and hybrid identities as Latiné, Asian and Queer. Through tender and rambunctious dancing, the performers embody an alchemy for radical future making where trauma and nostalgia bear complex and bittersweet possibilities.
This embodied storytelling emerges through the trio’s highly developed improvisational story-scores, which highlight connections across their identities and aesthetics. By integrating without erasing individual stories in a round-robin of recalling, conjuring, and witnessing, their dancing offers a way to restore fractured, diasporic identities.
Wild Tongue is built to be modular. Video, sound, and set elements can fill the largest of theaters, yet all the elements can be downscaled for more intimate or experimental venues. The trio hopes to perform the work in theaters alongside nontraditional spaces and galleries.
CHOREOGRAPHERS
Maria Gillespie, Nguyễn Nguyên, and Kevin Williamson have collaborated for over twenty years to make personal, poetic and deeply kinetic workthat explores their intersecting lives, identities and entwined experiences. The three dance artists/educators met in Los Angeles in the early 2000s, dancing and touring together in Gillespie’s Oni Dance Company while simultaneously exploring solo work and dancing in repertory companies that include David Rousséve/REALITY, L.A. Contemporary Dance Company, Robert Moses’ Kin, Ledges&Bones, and Helios Dance Theatre to name a few. In 2021, the trio reconnected to resurrect and reconfigure what is now a shared auto-ethnographic practice rooted in kinship and experimentation.
ENGAGEMENT
The Wild Tongue collaborators are committed to facilitating engagement activities rooted in their decade’s long experiences as educators and dance ambassadors. They aim to work creatively with presenters to generate experiences that address the needs of local communities through storytelling workshops that are accessible and nuanced. Through artmaking and play, they provide scores to inspire participants to exercise vulnerability and compassion in an embodied way while dancing to repair the pervasive influence of white body supremacy that exists in our social spheres.
In addition, the trio offers modular activities that includes workshops in dance repertory, technique master classes, pre and post-show Q&As, class visits within academia, and panel talks.
PREVIEW
Trailer: https://vimeo.com/1017356080
Excerpt: https://vimeo.com/1015078003
SELECTED PAST VENUES
The Ford Amphitheatre, The Getty Museum, LA County Museum of Art, the Roy and Edna Disney/Cal Arts Theater (REDCAT), Danspace Project, Dixon Place, Minnesota Fringe, UCLA, Cal Arts, The Fowler Museum, Highways Performance Space, Joyce SoHo, CounterPULSE and international venues in Beijing, Guangzhou, Tokyo, Mexico City.