Eric and Jess made a “pandemic pod” in June 2020 and the slow, steady creation of Up and Through is one of the ways we metabolized the past few years. This dance is aspirational—spacious, silly, sensate, and filled with togetherness.
They chose choreography for Up and Through which induces aliveness and connection, reduces agitation and stagnation, and since practiced states can make permanent traits, this dance has the potential to change us a little every time we dance it.
It’s a study of crossfades, sometimes long, sometimes numerous, always impossible, and typically generative. They are working to expand the number of possible interpretations of this dance rather than designing a dance that conveys a single theme or meaning. Up and Through continues our commitment to centering experiENCE to make experiMENTS in dance more accessible and seeks to transcend representation toward a more visceral exchange.
“I never even thought about whether or not they understand what I’m doing.… The emotional reaction is all that matters. As long as there’s some feeling of communication, it isn’t necessary that it be understood.
—John Coltrane
Up and Through Sources
Ishmael Houston Jones & Nina Martin
José Esteban Muñoz
Jeffrey McLamb
Joanna Kotze
Jeanine Durning
Trisha Brown
Diego Vega
Valentino
JW Anderson
Labour and Wait
“Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain.”
—José Esteban Muñoz/Crusing Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
Up and Through program
Up and Through is dedicated to Jeffrey McLamb
From Eric:
Jeffrey and I became friends at the Alvin Ailey school back in 1987 years before joining the Bill T Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company together. Jeffrey took me to the piers at the end of Christopher Street in NYC and would recall his adventures at the Balls in Harlem to me. He begged me to go with him. I always declined out of fear of not being at my best for Graham, Horton, or Ballet class in the morning. I regret not going with him. Jeffrey would often use “up and through” to describe ways of being deeply in or into something, immersed, saturated. He even used it once to describe a Chick-Fil-A chicken sandwich when we were on tour, “look at that sauce all up and through.”
Jeffrey died of AIDS in 1993.
