Performa/Dance Marks Their 10th Anniversary with ‘ANTHROPOCENE’

How does a dance-maker address an impending climate catastrophe while still energizing and delighting audiences? Jennifer Hart, artistic director of Performa/Dance uses artful choreography, clever text, ingenious costumes along with heaping doses of absurdism and humor in the allegorical work, ANTHROPOCENE, premiering Aug.15-16 at Ballet Austin’s AustinVentures StudioTheater.

Hart along with her project co-directors, Austin-based playwright and UT assistant professor Alexandra Bassiakou Shaw and experimental dance/theater maker Kelsey Oliver, began plotting the outline for this show long before the dancers/performers began studio rehearsals this past May. In this full-length production, Hart, Oliver and Shaw put human behavior and its consequences in the forefront.

The directors “focus on how we (people) respond to our current realities. ‘Anthropo,’ meaning human, and ‘cene’ referring to epochs. There are corners of the scientific world that believe we are living in the Anthropocene, where human activity is causing mass extinction. But we did not want it (the show) to be solely despairing, and so we take a nuanced view of our response to climate change,” Hart explains.

Surreal scenes at a beach, a laboratory family dinner table, and in a hospital room, among others, tie this allegorical work together. And while the co-directors collaboratively generated the show’s central themes, the dancers/ performers also contributed to the shaping of the work.

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Performa/Dance Artistic Director Jennifer Hart with Assistant Director Alexa Capareda in rehearsal. Photo by Matt Bradford.

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Kelsey Oliver as Alice in FINDING ALICE (IN WONDERLAND) in Performa/Dance’s PIVOT, August 2024. Photo by Corey Haynes.

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Preston Andrew Patterson, Kevin Murdock-Waters, Edward Carr, Alexa Capareda, Elise Pekarek and Paul Martin in THE MAD SCENE (2022). Photo by Corey Haynes.

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Dancer Kanami Nakabayashi in a promotional shot for Performa/Dance’s ANTHROPOCENE, premiering in August 2025. Photo by Sarah Annie Navarrete.

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Kelsey Oliver in Performa/Dance’s Pivot, August 2024. Photo by Sarah Annie Navarrete.

 

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Preston Andrew Patterson, Alexa Capareda, and Kevin Murdock-Waters in THE MAD SCENE, (2022). Photo by Corey Haynes.

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Dancers Isabella Lynch, Ian J. Bethany, Courtney Holland, and Paul Martin, and musicians Chris Murdock and Jon Lundbom (The Greenlawn Rangers) in Performa/Dance’s Bluegrass Junction. Photo by Matt Bradford.

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Alexa Capareda and dancers in a promotional photo for Performa/Dance’s ANTHROPOCENE, premiering in August 2025. Photo by Sarah Annie Navarrete.

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Hart, a vetted ballet choreographer, of late has felt compelled to create in contemporary and experimental dance theater realms, idioms that “bend” the framework of what is to be considered dance. Regarding the presentation of ANTHROPOCENE for Performa/Dance’s tenth anniversary season, Hart says, “this production is completely different than anything we’ve done, but it’s also an extension of a process that we’ve begun in the last couple of shows.”

To this end, the cast of ANTHROPOCENE includes dancers from the Austin contemporary and experimental dance/theater communities along with Performa/Dance company veterans who are in step with her evolving aesthetic sensibilities. When she and Ballet Austin dancer Edward Carr (who recently retired) formed Performa/Dance in 2014, for the first few seasons she set dances exclusively on Ballet Austin dancers. “They were the dancers I knew best, and I understood how ballet dancers moved.”

As Hart’s choreography morphed beyond contemporary non-narrative ballet, however, she sought modern dancers for their ability to improvise in the studio and, “their willingness to move in off-balanced, fearless ways.” Now, regardless of a dancer/performer’s training, she values dancers, “who can be co-creative and are not waiting to be told what steps to do,” she says.

In ANTHROPOCENE, Hart and her co-directors are not trying to convince their audiences what or how to think about climate change. She stresses that they are, “not trying to teach, and not doing social justice. And we don’t point fingers. We are just taking a lens to our (human) behavior and emotions.” She adds, “We’ve been very careful to make sure this work is at times funny, at times poignant, and always engaging.”

Judging from Performa/Dance’s 2024 season’s premier Finding Alice (in which Oliver was also involved), ANTHROPOCENE’s choreography, text, costumes, sets, music, and theatrical trappings will be a witty, provocative, poetic and entertaining blend. The incorporation of new artistic energies along with return of past collaborators for Perfoma/Dance’s shows speaks to how the company has not only taken root but continues to grow in the Austin dance community.

While ANTHROPOCENE charts a new artistic direction for Hart, she still comfortably dwells in the ballet realm. Since relocating to Austin in 2007 for a teaching position at Ballet Austin, she has advanced to the role of the school’s curriculum director. She has also choreographed ballets on the dancers in Ballet Austin’s fellowship program, Ballet Austin II, as well as those in Ballet Austin’s main company ranks. Unsurprisingly, her ability to simultaneously thrive in disparate artistic realms is a throughline in her career.

Hart’s creative and artistic strength are fueled by what she categorizes as her “unapologetic pursuit of what I am interested in and what is present for me in the moment.” She notes, “I have always seen myself in the ballet realm, but also as an outsider to that realm. There is a part of me that is a true ballerina and a part of me would love to make a full-length Romeo and Juliet. But I am enjoying this alternate realm.”

—TARA MUNJEE