Peter Kyle & Christina Amendolia in KnowOne
photo: Mike Depasquale
KnowOne is a 60-minute performance installation choreographed and conceived by Peter Kyle featuring seven dancers, live music by Michael Bellar and the As-Is Ensemble, and marble sculpture and video animation by Venske & Spänle. This collaborative project premiered in September 2010 during the Dumbo Arts Festival at One Arm Red, in New York City.On the surface, this work is a thrilling performance where dance, music and sculpture are experienced on equal terms. Below the surface, KnowOne achieves a heightened sense of place and enriched awareness of our moment-to-moment existence, much like what anthropologist Michael Jackson’s describes in his insightful book, At Home In The World, where “There seems to be no resistance between oneself and the world. The relationship is all.”
The project evolved, in part, out of a desire to create a platform for experiencing dance, music, and sculpture on equal terms. The alley stage, where the project was first performed helped achieve this equality, as audiences were seated directly adjacent to the two long sides of the rectangular performance area, bringing them into extreme proximity to the performers. To further heighten the intimacy of this setting, we experimented with having performers emerge from and or return to the audience unexpectedly, to exciting effect. The adaptable work is tailored to each different performance venue, ranging from traditional proscenium theaters to atypical open format spaces. Extrapolating upon anthropologist Michael Jackson’s writings in At Home In The World, where he likens the notion of being at home to a sense of flow, this work uses kinetic interactivity of live music and dance as well as the unlikely juxtaposition of marble sculpture and moving bodies to explore our relationship to ourselves, other people, and to the elements that surround us. Practically speaking, the interdisciplinary work is a sort of call to consciousness – an exposition of the experiential dialogues in which we engage, physically, musically, sculpturally, and how our understanding and appreciation of these dialogues invite persistent awareness, pliability and resilience.
Our work on KnowOne began in January 2008 with a generous Workspace space grant residency at Abrons Arts Center. Subsequently we developed and showed material for the project in theaters, art galleries, and studio settings including: the 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center, the McKenna Theatre at SUNY New Paltz, RSTR4 art space in Munich, Germany, and Margaret Thatcher Projects. For this project, the company received a competitive grant from the American Music Center Live Music for Dance Program, and two invaluable space grant/creative residencies at One Arm Red, where the work premiered to cheering, standing-room-only crowds on September 24, 2010 at the Dumbo Arts Festival. The original cast of ten performers included Christina Amendolia, Josh Christopher, Dylan Crossman, Justin Flores, Scott Giguere, Theresa Ling, Peter Kyle, and musicians Michael Bellar, Rob Jost and Brad Wentworth.
Click HERE to view a slideshow of images documenting some of the development of this work at various locations in NYC, and beyond.
Click HERE to view a trailer of KnowOne.
Click HERE to view the entire performance of KnowOne at its 2010 premiere.