XX: Where’s the Power?

Created and performed by Lauren Beale, Ondine Geary, Brooke McNamara, and Kate Speer

XX: Where’s the Power? exercises our readiness to turn on, transfer, and transmute power through unhinged, corporeal dissent against the patriarchal grab. In this evening of performance, we slam our heartbroken and hungry bodies into the body politic to access our own interior pulse and reconnect to something larger than fear. In an effort to confront the very nature of insecurity, we ask, Where’s the power? What follows is an absurd ride through hysteria, struggle, grief, and release as we search for the possibility of a higher love.

XX is a collaboration between four Front Range dance artists: Lauren Beale, Brooke McNamara, Ondine Geary, & Kate Speer. We met at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Dance MFA program, where we shared an interest in cultivating more open and supported spaces for art. XX gravitated together because we crave performative experiences that require the performer and the audience to keep asking, to keep learning, and to keep arriving fully. Based in the Boulder/Denver area, we move in and out of collaborative based projects and our own individual queries. Learn more at xxcollaboration.com.

XX: Where’s the Power? was supported by a Boulder County Arts Alliance Endowment Award and premiered to sold-out audiences at Block 1750 in April 2017. XX was invited to perform the work as part of Feminism & Co. Weekend at MCA Denver in May 2017. With the support of a Colorado Creative Industries Career Advancement Grant, the work performed at Performática in Puebla, Mexico this past March 2018. Some of our audience feedback has been:

“So moved to witness work that truly digs into the ways we can all oppress each other. It was so hard to watch, but it felt real and a true experience of the complexity of our times.”

“I have seen so many post election pieces, but this was the most real in the ways it layered experience, looked in on itself and refused to simplify or reduce itself down to a clear ending. The un-resolvability was powerful.”

“There were many familiar feminist objects, like the eggs, but what you did with them and where you pushed the piece to go blew my mind. I was constantly intrigued about the possibilities you created for us to experience.”

“Profoundly transgressive and completely normal. This piece could only have been made by deeply embodied women or women that have been impacted by birth and motherhood”