Our Work
Unruly Body Tanztheater makes inter-disciplinary, eco-somatic dance theater & dance film.
Dance is the intentional investigation of the movement of the body, through space and time. As long as the function of the investigation is explicitly held in movement exploration, it is dance. Dance has held an important function in society throughout all of history. Dance has functioned as a way of understanding ourselves as a community; what we ritualize, how we celebrate, what we believe, how we relate to one another, how we understand the role of the human community in relationship to the web of life. Through folk dancing, sacred dancing, and concert dancing, the identity of a human community can be deconstructed through analysis of its dance.
01
This Wild Love
This Wild Love is a permeable smear of the ecologically, erotically queer. Based off Andreas Weber’s Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology and the lived body queerness: body-as-connected-to-ecological perspective of dance maker, KJ Dahlaw in collaboration with dancer, Riley Taylor and sound designer Karima Walker. This Wild Love is an interdisciplinary collaboration of film, sound, dance and fiber arts. It is 20 minutes in length.
This Wild Love explores erotic ecology through the lens of the landscape of my own desire. I draw from my lived body experience as someone who came out later in life because of patterns of Christian dominance and internalized homophobia that lived in my body. I draw from my lived body experience of discovering queer desire like a sweet, explosion of aliveness. The work is inspired by the state bird of my and my beloved’s homeland of Minnesota, the Common Loon and is a tightly knit, improvisational score. The set includes a large, hand-felted nest and needle felted cat tails.
This Wild Love premiered at Shawl Anderson Dance Center, March 7 & 8 2020 at Converging Passages, a show produced by Unruly Body Tanztheater in collaboration with Renee Murray and Kat Hickey.
02
A Study: Phenomenology of Time in the Dancing Body
Created for Drove IV, performed at ODC Argyle, A Study: Phenomenology of Time in the Dancing Body is an exploration of the lived body experiencing of time.
03
Orfeo & Euridice
A queer reimagining of the Orfeo & Eurydice mythology produced by West Edge Opera. Directed and choreographed by KJ Dahlaw. Summer 2018 at the Bridgeyard, Oakland, CA.
04
Descent
'Descent' is a queer underworld journey, loosely based on the Orfeo-Eurydice mythology through a Jungian mythological and queer frame. This work premiered at Joe Goode Annex at the West Wave Dance Festival in April 2018 as movement research for upcoming Orfeo & Euridice opera.