LISTENING IN MOTION

Some performances ask you to suspend disbelief. The Red Pants Collective asks you to suspend your need to know what, exactly, is happening.

Presented as part of the Wayward Music Series, this evening of improvised movement and sound brought together founders Giordana Falzone and James Falzone with dancers Alia Swersky and Jadi Carboni alongside an ensemble of intrepid musicians. The result wasn’t just a collection of solos or random interdisciplinary collaborations—it was an ecosystem. Every sound altered the movement. Every movement seemed to reveal another acoustic possibility hidden somewhere inside the room itself. This wasn’t improvisation as “anything goes.” It was improvisation as radical, heightened listening.

The evening began with one of those accidental stage pictures you couldn’t choreograph if you tried. Alia Swersky appeared framed by a window as violinist Heather Bentley entered nearby, sunlight pouring through the glass to backlight the scene. For a moment Swersky looked less like a performer than a ghost who had wandered into the Chapel Performance Space by mistake.

Throughout the evening, the architecture of the historic building refused to remain merely architecture. Windows, pillars, chairs, and even a tiny microphone became collaborators.

Giordana Falzone, wearing a bright red shirt and a long braid, moved with an intentionally peculiar physical logic. Tiny hesitations, awkward pivots, almost-human gestures that never quite settled into recognizable behavior. The building itself began to feel haunted—not by spirits exactly, but by possibilities. What if every corner of the room contained another way of moving? Another timeline?

That feeling only deepened as the improvisation unfolded.

Swersky’s shoulders undulated in peculiar geometric patterns as she made her way across the floor in a slow crawl. Entering into a duet with Falzone, their stacked bodies became an intricate conversation of push and pull. As they gradually built speed, they began sharing weight in increasingly wild ways. At one point Swersky appeared to float effortlessly on Falzone’s raised thighs in a way that seemed to ignore gravity altogether.

The duet carried them downstage until they encountered Carboni, who’d been engaged in what looked like a conversation with one of the massive support pillars. She created a strange duet with the architecture, repeatedly returning to its surface before finally rebelling against it—bursting from behind the column into a spinning orbit that eventually delivered her back to the other dancers, all three of them tangled low across the floor.

Swersky’s presence was magnetic throughout the evening. Her fluid strength and remarkably focused responsiveness to the constantly shifting weight of the other dancers made her feel essential to the dance’s sense of otherworldliness. At one point she slowly slid a chair across the floor for what felt like five uninterrupted minutes, transforming an ordinary object into something strangely charismatic, almost sentient.

Before this she and Falzone entered an extended duet involving two chairs that somehow managed to be comedic, awkward, deeply intimate, and technically astonishing all at once. Impressive images emerged almost casually—Falzone curiously sliding over Swersky’s back before reappearing between her legs on the floor—but virtuosity never seemed to be the point. They weren’t demonstrating what they already knew. They were discovering relationships in real time.

One of my favorite things about watching skilled improvisers is witnessing their willingness to remain genuinely present. Nothing felt predetermined. Every decision seemed to arise from the one immediately before it.

That same curiosity extended into the music. James Falzone’s clarinet drifted effortlessly between lyrical melody and abstract texture while Tom Baker’s guitar and electronics dissolved into strange futuristic landscapes. Greg Campbell moved comfortably between percussion and horns, creating an environment where rhythm continually shifted beneath the dancers’ feet—or rather, beneath their bare feet. Not a single performer wore shoes, a small detail that reinforced the intimate atmosphere of the evening. Everyone appeared grounded, literally.

Then there was the theremin. Every time Baker reached toward the invisible electromagnetic field surrounding the instrument, it felt as though someone had quietly switched on a time machine. The theremin remains one of the few instruments that still sounds genuinely alien, and here it became exactly that—a soundtrack for time travel. Combined with Baker’s dense pedal effects, the music frequently slipped into an edgy and uncanny territory, like the performance were picking up radio transmissions from another world.

During one very memorable sequence, the dancers lifted Swersky onto their shoulders, creating what appeared to be a twenty-foot-tall humanoid creature responding to the erratic thump of a hand drum. Then, just as suddenly, the creature dissolved. The dancers scattered across the room while the theremin continued singing overhead. Falzone returned to the sunfilled window. Carboni folded herself into dramatic splits beside a pillar. Swersky sat quietly next to Baker, almost like another musician in the ensemble, listening with psychic concentration to the invisible frequencies filling the room while her shoulders began a very subtle liquid dance. The image felt less composed than discovered.

Improvisation often creates riveting individual moments, but The Red Pants Collective excelled at creating sustained atmospheres. Time stretched. One moment dissolved seamlessly into another without obvious transitions. Physical risk entered gradually.

In one striking diagonal pathway across the space, the dancers repeatedly slung Swersky across the floor. At first it looked alarming—as though she were being thrown or collapsing. But as the phrase repeated over and over, resetting itself each time, it became clear that she was actively experimenting with momentum, choosing when to float and when to fall rather than surrendering to either. The sequence became a study in trust disguised as chaos.

The musicians were equally experimental. At one point a microphone disappeared into clothing, creating scratchy amplified textures that transformed fabric into percussion. Later, that same tiny microphone found its way into a metal bowl attached to a miniature amplifier, producing magnified metallic sounds and shimmering feedback resonances. Suddenly the smallest sounds became landscapes.

The dancers responded to this change in sound immediately, drifting in and around the horseshoe-shaped audience with an uncanny popping quality, limbs seemed to randomly engage and detach from each other and the space. The dancers began appearing unexpectedly in my peripheral vision as they moved in and behind the seated audience before disappearing again. The audience wasn’t simply watching the improvisation. We had quietly become part of its geography.

The Red Pants Collective was founded by father-and-daughter collaborators James and Giordana Falzone, and that long history of shared listening could be felt throughout the performance. The artists functioned less like individuals taking turns than like family members finishing one another’s sentences and sometimes talking over each other—not because they knew what would happen next, but because they trusted one another enough not to know.

Captivating performances don’t always arrive with clear narratives or polished conclusions. Sometimes they simply invite us into a room where people are listening so deeply—to one another, to architecture, to sound, and to silence—that the ordinary world begins to feel wonderfully strange and unexpectedly full of possibility. Pillars became portals, sunlight became lighting design, and a theremin convinced me that time travel might actually be possible.

Red Pants Collective’s show took place July 10, 2026 at the Chapel Performance Space at the Good Shepherd Center. More info can be found HERE.