Ephemera:
In a final co-creation between living artists Deborah Black and Sophia Treanor and their late collaborator Mary Overlie, Ephemera is a dance theater performance that explores entropy and the emergence of difference in our universe. Amidst a forest of sequined cook’s aprons and caps, vacuums, microwaves, and clowns, Ephemera makes visible the invisible. The logic and illogic of life’s beginnings are made material by explosions of movement and sound, expansion, contraction, symmetry, asymmetry, and popcorn, to ultimately ask: Is this all there is?

Show Details:
Presented by the Harold Clurman Center for New Works in Movement and Dance Theater (MAD) from June 22 - 25th at the Stella Adler Center of the Arts 

New York, NY

5 Performances, Free to the Public
June 22: 7:30pm(Q+A to follow)

June 23: 7:30pm 

June 24: 2pm and 7:30pm

June 25: 2pm

This production features: 

Why we need your help:

There are many expenses involved in our entirely self-produced shows! Your donations will help us cover the cost of:

What your help can provide: 

$5 buys a box of popcorn 

$20 rents a studio for an hour of rehearsal

$50 buys the fabric for one costume

$75 buys a used microwave 

$100 rents a studio for a day

$200 pays the light board operator

$250 pays the stage manager

$350 pays one ensemble member

$450 pays a dramaturg for two days

$500 pays one musician

$1000 pays the salary for a week of residency for one co-director

$5000 pays for the 18-months of studio rentals


More about Ephemera - What are we making? 

Ephemera can be described as a live non-AI audiovisual moving artwork. It features the emergence of the four fundamental forces of the universe. Only one of which expresses asymmetry, thus propelling life into existence – the weak force. 

Proteins of visual movement get built just like they did when the first signs of life appeared, thanks to the boundaries of membranes. A dance appears from these proteins only to fall back into sleep, into dream, and back awake. Representation emerges and falls away as human perception and consciousness persist. Human intelligence moves in and out of meaning in the cycle of awake and sleep, concentration and daze, life and death. 

Is this all there is? 

No. 

We find each other 

and that changes 

everything

nothing 

and everything supports our journey together, still 

connected, into difference, connected 

into differences, connected 

until it falls 

into nothing as an echo 

of all that ever was

We are living and communicating with Mary Overlie, who passed in 2020. She left us the drawings and instructions to make this performed artwork. 

We are quoting her, through her life’s work, but as we approach her ideas they fall away, becoming something else, becoming new ephemera. That fits – the only prompt she gave us was “You think it’s this, but it’s this.”  

The research for Ephemera has circled around entropic processes (aka chaos) in which two forces moving as a unified wave differentiate into distinct entities, vibrations, particles. We have all seen this in the branching of organic matter like tree roots and branches, neural networks, mycelium networks, and water tributaries flowing across the earth. 

We’ve also worked with microbiologist Sara Fresard, studying the building blocks of life: mRNA proteins. What began as mere strands of amino acids became what we now know of as RNA. The strands replicated themselves into DNA, which over millenia became protein-building systems that eventually grew membranes and synchronized into living organisms. 

In a time where there is growing distrust of science, we are striving to create a poetic depiction of these scientific phenomena -- a magnification to make the invisible, visible.  To embrace the inescapable, biological emergence of life and subsequently death as an inevitable miracle. 

Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus added an important performative concept of form and representation that many of us tend to value more than the rich perceptual processes and experiments of consciousness and the subconscious. In other words, we often value the end more than the becoming. 

Recordings of Mary Overlie’s choreographic works have provided touchstones of shape, dynamic, and relationship. As we have created this piece we have also danced her archive for each other, studying her choreographic mind. 

Mary Overlie was born January 15, 1946 in Terry, Montana; conceived Movement Research, a cooperative dance organization of international renown; founded Danspace Project with Barbara Dilley, a dance presenting organization in New York City; first teacher hired to establish the Experimental Theatre Wing at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University; a choreographer and performer with an international reputation in the field of experimental dance, for many years teaching and performing as a part of theInternational Tanz Wochen working with Ismael Ivo and Karl Regensburger in Vienna. 

The Six Viewpoints was her child and it has done a unique thing in the world of theater and performance philosophy; it has a quiet and infectious ability to represent itself without her. She joined those who worked to elevate theater. Her leveling of the creative hierarchy by focusing on the materials has conceptually and practically innovated the performance worlds of both theater and dance.

Sophia and Deborah both met Overlie and the Six Viewpoints separately in 2011

Sophia Treanor is a director, performer, and educator. She worked with Mary Overlie as a student, teaching assistant, performer, and close companion throughout the United States, Europe, and China from 2011 until Overlie’s death in June of 2020. Sophia served as a primary reader for the Viewpoints book, Standing in Space: The Six Viewpoints Theory and Practice. She is currently co-directing a documentary about Mary Overlie (www.overliefilm.com), teaching the Viewpoints internationally along with the Jean Hamilton Floor Barre Technique, and is a faculty member of the Stella Adler Studio of Acting. Sophia’s live performance work has been seen in private and public spaces, theaters, and galleries across New York City, including Danspace Project, the Living Theater, the Center for Performance Research, CAVE, Triskelion Arts, and Dixon Place. 

Deborah Black is a dance and theater artist, writer, and educator. She has performed in the work of Deborah Hay, Mary Overlie, and Susan Rethorst. While living in Rotterdam from 2013-16, she created and toured with the Tuning People (BE) and Ymist Company (NO). Her choreography has been presented in New York at the TANK, Judson Church, Roulette, Joyce SoHo, Manhattan Repertory Theatre, Dixon Place, AUNTS and in Germany at the Lucky Trimmer Tanz Performance Serie and ArToll. Deborah taught physical theater and dance at the Fontys Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Tilburg. She taught guest and master classes at Goldsmiths University London, NYU’s Experimental Theatre Wing, Drama Studio London, Ohio University, as well as private workshops in New York City and all across Europe.

Sophia and Deborah’s shared questions about the intersections of theater and dance led them to work together in various capacities: teaching the Six Viewpoints and Jean Hamilton’s Floor Barre, stewarding the Mary Overlie Legacy Project with Nicolás Noreña and Tony Perucci, and creating Ephemera. 

Before Mary passed away in 2020, she asked Sophia – 

She put pencil to paper to show Sophia on a drawing and said – 

“One person starts here, and another person starts here–there is unison and small changes in timing. It’s like this line. See how it comes in at this angle? You think it’s this, but it’s this.” 

What we will present in June at the Harold Clurman Center for New Works in Movement and Dance Theater (MAD) is the result of Sophia and Deborah’s collaboration with Mary after her passing. 

In loving memory of Mary, and in gratitude for the adventures she set us off on.