C H O R E O G R A P H E R ‘S
N O T E

Atlas Kid is an exploration of the near-mythical influence of childhood memories on our adult lives. The gestures and partnerships in the piece grew from a series of rule games I designed in collaboration with the dancers, using architectural theories found in Reiser + Umemoto’s Atlas of Novel Tectonics.

The book’s forward by Sanford Kwinter inspired the first steps of our process:

"Cold combustion suggests the slowing down of the unfolding of geometry that previously was either held in exquisite or frozen suspense or was subject to the instantaneous and uncontrolled unfolding that we know as explosion. Anyone who discovers a middle ground, a rhythm of unfolding that delivers the geometries of matter to the senses in real time...endows the world with novelty... It is the duty of architecture to deliver sensation."

Atlas Kid builds on this principle of unfolding geometry and novelty to conjure up a dreamlike world sculpted from the temperatures, textures, shapes, and feelings of our childhood memories. Using the playful habits of shadow making, mimicry, and exaggeration, the dancers re-imagine traumatic and triumphant experiences that formed their perceptions of the adult world around them—a place where they are, in their re-imagining, both natives and foreigners.

- Banning Bouldin

Atlas Kid premiered at OZ ARTS NASHVILLE on April 1 & 2, 2016

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