does your heart pound in your chest like mine (2025)
Direction: Kym McDaniel
Choreography: Kym McDaniel, Hope Bodley, Maliaka Burke, Ava Hunt, Keagon McCarty, Mariya Moiseytseva, Maya Regule, Brianna Rosato, Katie Sabatino
Performance: Hope Bodley, Maliaka Burke, Ava Hunt, Keagon McCarty, Mariya Moiseytseva, Maya Regule, Brianna Rosato, Katie Sabatino
This piece was made in collaboration with dance majors at The Ohio State University. It is a development of No Negative Space, a duet I created in collaboration with two dancers (Nicole Spence and Amy Sutheimer-Barnes) in 2017. This group iteration of the duet references the rhythms of the original dance while developing new identities of repetition and ritual. The piece moves between structured, numerically-driven choreographies to dancer-led improvisations rooted in choice, impulse, and desire.
I am interested in choreography as a device to make invisible structures, pain, and feelings visible. In this dance, the choreography was also an opportunity to explore relational empathy and conflict. What is the process of interrupting a repetitive personal, cultural, or political pattern? How does this interruption change oneself and consequently impact a group?
In other words or interpretations, the dance could also be about the time I listened to “Shadow (George Daniel Remix)” by Carly Rae Jepsen on repeat during an 8-hour flight from Salt Lake City to Dublin, or a recent, unexpected fall I had where I stood up, passed out, and woke up to a broken foot and ankle. Choreographies of repetition, falling, and interrupting linear time embody my own experience with disability and unconsciously seep into the rehearsal process.
The title of the dance, does your heart pound in your chest like mine, is both an invitation to choreographer-performer, performer-performer, and performer-audience. In some ways your heart must circulate blood like mine, and in other ways, it doesn’t, not at all. For me, the dance lies at this intersection: the complexity of living and enduring as one physical body in a sea of other bodies, while also feeling distinctly separate, and, in my own personal experience, existing outside of normative ability or time. There is an inherent loneliness to this group/non-group dynamic, and, I believe the dance ultimately seeks to address this loneliness. I was simultaneously creating my personal film, weightless, while creating this dance, and the soundscore of the dancers rhythmic stompings became an integral soundscore for the film. I’m indebted to the dancer’s willingness to experiment and commitment to curiousity throughout the rehearsal process.
The Ohio State University
Department of Dance Fall Concert
November 6-8, 2025