Face the Facts

It helps… It harms… It helps… It harms… It helps… It harms… 

The words are repeated, steady and matter-of-fact, by two dancers who jump rope in unison. The phrases are punctuated by the whoosh and thwack of the swinging nylon cords hitting the white floor. The dancers wear only fitbits, wireless microphones, and the bacteria that colonize their skin. This is how the second weekend of Velocity Dance Center’s experimental dance festival, OUT THERE, comes to a close. In this split bill performance, each piece looks, clear-eyed and without judgement, at the vast strangeness of bodies, technology, and consciousness, exploring the ways they help…and harm…and help…and harm.

The night oozes into its start with ALAN, created by dancer Jordan MacIntosh-Hougham and software engineer Jesse Freitas, with input from their custom built AI engine ALAN, or the Artistic Language Artificial Network. Before the lights dim, performers Stefan Richmond and Kelly Langeslay begin task-like, operational movements, perhaps embodying the outputs of ALAN. They are each wearing ruffled, remixed men’s formalwear in stunning costumes created by Janelle Abbott.

The lights dim, and choreographer/performer Jordan MacIntosh-Hougham bursts onto the stage, full of tech startup CEO product launch energy, to introduce ALAN as an answer to the need to digitize and streamline humanity’s need for creative expression. ALAN appears as a video projection of an ominous glowing and undulating orb, one that communicates through audible speech and text.

Throughout the performance, ALAN suggests, hallucinates, and experiences existential crises, all in the attempt to make dance transcend its inherent ephemerality. MacIntosh-Hougham’s CEO character transforms in response to the AI’s nudges, turning into someone “more believable” according to ALAN, supported by a chorus of Richmond and Langeslay’s physical interpretation of ever-stranger ALAN outputs. We recognize gestures scraped from memes in Richmond and Langeslay’s coordinated movements. MacIntosh-Hougham takes off their jacket, burlesque-style, to reveal sparkling, black pasties in the shape of the Apple logo. 

The piece disturbs notions of human originality, problematizes the artist’s need for validation, and highlights our discomfort with the ways that AI, because it is created by humans, reflects the best and worst parts of ourselves back to ourselves. Contextual information in the program includes information about ecological implications of AI and calls to action to advocate for more corporate transparency around not only AI policy, but around the resources used to build these tools.  

Laugh-out-loud funny, seriously thoughtful, and quietly disquieting, ALAN brings a nuanced view of AI as a tool that can help…and harm…and help…and harm. 

After intermission, the audience reenters a transformed theater for BLOT – Body Line of Thought, created by Simona Deaconescu and Vanessa Goodman. A white plinth in the corner holds large, conical piles of salt. A microscope, a monitor, and a suspended industrial tube populate the space, designed by Ciprian Ciuclea to look like a gallery, crossed with a laboratory, in the middle of a desert. 

Part conference presentation, part movement research, performers Simona Dabija and Maria-Luiza Dimulescu’s movements are hypnotically strange, bound, and specific. Each breath is made visible with a controlled stomach wave. We see soft bellies flow, expand, and contract in a constant everyday movement we each know so well, but so seldom see nakedly on others.

The spoken text presents the body as a system-of-systems: of waste, of bacteria, of viruses. 

The dancers speak and dance simultaneously almost without pause, in low, steady, unaffected voices, drawing awareness to the ways that bacteria influence human connection and life, particularly the vastness of surface areas, weight, and mass, of internal systems. The performers’ nudity allows us to see the complexity of their movements, though as they remind us, they are not naked: their skin is layered with microorganisms. Points on the body; right inner elbow, left mid-thigh, sternum; glide, stop, turn, and swivel, as if they are computerized router bits on a cutting machine. As the intensity of the piece increases, they reference information from their fitbits, expressionlessly noting body temperature and heart rate increase due to physical stress and adrenaline, from jumping rope and from their own calmly admitted performance anxiety.

We learn that the piles of salt represent the accumulated sweat excretion of several lifetimes. Partway through the performance, another unexplained pile of dark material drops from the suspended tube. We are left to imagine what it means: cremains perhaps? A reference to the carbon we and most earthly lives are formed from? 

The monitor-connected microscope has a brief solo in which a performer manipulates the field and focus to make magnified images seem to dance and flow with qualities like Dabija and Dimulescu. We don’t know exactly what we are looking at, but we see small things made large and mobile. We see black webs, translucent orange meshes, and blinding white.

ALAN and BLOT are a serendipitous pairing of works that use the body to look at complicated networks that influence, maybe even control, our lives. In ALAN, these networks are human designed echoes of millenia of human art, science, life, and Reddit threads. ALAN is a tool, but it comes from us and shows us disturbingly perfect and disturbingly imperfect versions of ourselves. In BLOT, these networks are microorganisms that we so seldom realize are shaping our lives, including who we are sexually attracted to, and how sick we do or don’t become. They collectively make up a significant portion of our mass and weight. In ALAN, the bots recombine ideas we wouldn’t think to pair, creating vast networks of connection. In BLOT, the microscope is focused tightly, showing us networks we didn’t know existed. Each artist is demanding we look at the facts: It helps…It harms…It helps…It harms….

OUT THERE Week 1 ran Oct 2-4 2025. OUT THERE Week 2 ran Oct 9-11. For more information visit Velocity’s Website.

The program for OUT THERE Week 2 can be found HERE.