TUNDRA
2006-2007
Artistic Direction: Mare Hieronimus
Performance: Marcy Schlissel, Mare Hieronimus, Elyse Sparkes, Mika Lior
Video: Tony Schultz
Sound: Derek Morton
TUNDRA is the newest work in progress. This triptych is concerned with figure and landscape/space, and explores three disparate and remote settings as psychic reality and metaphor: the moors of old England, the search for northwest water passage from Atlantic to Pacific Oceans, and the imagined celestial space of the night sky. These three locations are linked together into one muted and overlapping environment that considers the experience of residing inside of an atmosphere that is austere and outlying.

spark/ridge/perch/till
2006-2007
Artistic Direction: Mare Hieronimus
Guest Artist: Sharon Mansur
Performance: Mare Hieronimus, Sharon Mansur, Marcy Schlissel, Elyse Sparkes
Sound: William Catanzaro, Derek Morton, in collaboration with Mare Hieronimus
Video: Kevin Doyle
Costume/Set: Mare Hieronimus in collaboration with the performers
Length: 15 minutes
Premiere: August 3, 2006 Solar One, Stuyvesant Cove Park, NYC
This work is a series of consecutive, fleeting, and intimate solos, set for three or four women. Weaving together disparate elements of seemingly unrelated aspects of history, culture and location, including WW2 America, 18th century Victorian England, and the Appalachian trail, and drawing from each performers unique relationship to the moving body in space, these solo investigations tell distinct, nonlinear and abstract stories. Through a mythic lens, these stories reveal both gradual and sudden shifts of the interior psychic landscape of the dancer. This work changes form, and is site-specific to the environment that it becomes a part of. In outdoor venues, the piece uses the exterior space and architecture as a living organism. In indoor environments, the piece is partially self-lit with a flashlight, where each solo becomes like an apparition, and exterior space and environment almost completely disappear. Playwright, Director, and Video Artist Kevin Doyle is collaborating with Maré to incorporate video imagery into this work. Through simplicity of form and subtle manipulations of time, associated landscape images will appear and dissolve, creating a complex layering where the inner movement of thought and psychic reality of the performer are made more visible.

Crimson solo
2006
Artistic Direction/Performance: Mare Hieronimus
Sound: William Catanzaro in collaboration with Mare Hieronimus
Costume: Mare Hieronimus
Length: 8 minutes
Premiere: February 3, 2006, The CoolNY Festival, NYC
In Crimson solo, the sensual experience of the body, and the atmospheric experience of light are linked together into one organism that describes an ongoing process of flux. This process of change is explored both literally and metaphorically, through relating these concepts to transient states of being, wander and travel. During the first seven minutes of the solo, the dancing is continuous, and is juxtaposed by a seven minute measured build of light. This culminates in one minute of stillness and full illumination, where subtler shifts of motion can be perceived. This work is set to the sounds of trains in motion, the digging of a shovel into the earth, planes flying overhead, while Leonard Cohen's song "the partisan" weaves almost inaudibly in and out of the frame.

dreamrunner
2005
Artistic Direction/Performance: Mare Hieronimus
Sound: William Catanzaro and Mare Hieronimus with guitar by Mark Sylvester
Costume: Mare Hieronimus
Length: 8 minutes
Premiere: October 15, 2005, Dumbo Dance Festival, NYC
dreamrunner is an ethereal solo investigation into the world of dreams and dream imagery, and the dialogue that occurs between consciousness, and the sub-terrainian geography of the mind. Set to guitar harmonics by Mark Sylvester, and found sound of water dripping, an electrical saw, and the rustle of leaves, this solo centers around a dimly lit spot, where the dancer slips and slices in and out of the circular border of light.

Innana
2005
Artistic Direction: Edna Emmet with Mare Hieronimus
Visual Installation/Paintings: Edna Emmet
Performance: Mare Hieronimus
Sound: Bee Elvy and Mare Hieronimus
Costume/Set: Mare Hieronimus
Length: 15 minutes
Premiere: January 27, 2005, Villa Julie College St. Paul Pavilion, Stevenson, MD.
The Sumerian myth of Inanna is the worlds first recorded love story. This narrative, ultimately about the act of choice making, is reconstructed into a nonlinear solo investigation that juxtaposes the epic nature of Innana's story and the mundane act of pouring and drinking water. Task-oriented vignettes divide four divergent movement tableaus, ranging from the tender and fluid to the jagged and sharp. In these intermissions, four glasses of water are poured, then dyed blue, green, red and yellow. One is eventually chosen to drink. This project was a collaborative effort with Painter Edna Emmet. The piece was presented in a site-specific gallery setting, alongside the series of Emmet's abstract works.

Sinuit and other corporeal episodes
2005
Artistic Direction: Mare Hieronimus
Performance: Mare Hieronimus, Liz Filbrun, Hannah Watkins, Meghan Keil
Sound: William Catanzaro and Bee Elvy in collaboration with Mare Hieronimus
Costume: Mare Hieronimus
Length: 19 minutes
Premiere: April, 2005, Sarah Lawrence College Bessie Schonberg Theater
In this triptych quartet, touch and the reaction of the body to touch is explored through sensuality, violence, indifference and curiosity. Divided into three sections that layer and accumulate through density of material, number of performers, lighting and sound, each section is broken up by a dimly lit interlude where the performers exchange blouses. Set to a diverse range of sounds, including a Vietnamese harp, the noise of a record skipping, the brittleness of clanking change, and other found sound, the desire for, and rejection of physical communion becomes a gateway into individual and group dynamics, expressed through a vocabulary that is slippery, sensory, fractured.

Inevitability of Bone Attachment
2004
Artistic Direction: Mare Hieronimus
Performance: Milka Djordjevich, Lori Yuill
Sound: Lucas Zarwell
Costume: Mare Hieronimus
Length: 9 minutes
Premiere: January 7, 2005, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, NYC
This duet paints a shifting picture of two women in a southern-ly tinted landscape caught in the net of each other. Verging on the abusive, sweet, and out of control, these women commingle as they delineate the shape of intimacy, interchanging roles. The dancers swing between extremes of slow motion and speed, small gesture and full body action, confinement of space and sweeping spatial pathway, constructing a cyclical reality. Set to the washing and spiraling sounds of water crashing on a far off shore, and juxtaposed by the nostalgic melody of a harmonica, they stand, watch, leap, pounce, and struggle to define themselves as they face one another.

surfacing
2003
Artistic Direction: Mare Hieronimus
Performance: Ellen Carol, Mare Hieronimus, Serene Webber, Jane Jerardi
Sound: Lucas Zarwell
Video: Mare Hieronimus
Costume: Mare Hieronimus
Length: 19 minutes
Premiere: March 22, 2003, The Jack Guidone Theater, Washington DC
This quartet uses the repetitive action of installation as a metaphor for creation. Over the space of 19 minutes, 20 bone white plaster sculptures are placed in slow motion, in a grid-like order, horizontally across the performance floor. Out of the structural architecture of the grid, four interlacing solos emerge, all separately dealing with the nature of repetition and time in the body, and how this repetitive action, through exhaustion, boredom and curiosity, gives way to variation. Oceanic and tidal images float through the frame. This piece also deals with the perception of time, and how it is that giant changes do occur, which can go, at first, unnoticed.