Target Margin Theater hosts
SIX QUIET DOGS
Created by Abigail Levine
Music: Paula Matthusen
Design: Karen Boyer
Lighting & Video: Shana Crawford
Dancers: Martita Abril, Anna Azrieli, Julian Barnett, and Kristopher KQ Pourzal
Producer: Amanda Hameline
Responding to the birth of her daughter and the death of her mentor, composer Alvin Lucier, Levine gave herself a two-year assignment to pay attention to her world through sound—sirens and pauses in conversation, clanging radiators and stalled cars, police batons on bodies, artillery shells on apartment buildings. In Six Quiet Dogs, Levine shapes these observations into a record of the intimate, overlapping experiences of a birth and death through attention to sound.
Six Quiet Dogs is a deeply personal work. Levine writes, When my daughter, Andaluz, was born in 2021, I worried that, as she gained language, she might lose the intensity of her direct, embodied experience. I began to track her development of language in writing as a way to accompany her and to challenge my own assumptions. Then, only weeks after her birth, I lost a cherished mentor, pioneering electronics composer, Alvin Lucier. Alvin used language as musical material, often dissolving words back into sound. This return trip from language back towards the experience of our senses felt like a balm to my worries about Andaluz.
From this meditation, she has spun a night of 80s-inspired dancing, golden eggs, lullabies about Andy Warhol and just intonation, and intimate entanglements with unspectacular household items that happen to make spectacular sounds. The performance will be accompanied by Words Begin as Sound, a chapbook of texts written during the work’s development, edited by Andrea Kleine and designed by Michael Reardon.
Performances
October 23 – 25 at 7:30pm
October 26 at 2pm
Location
The Doxsee @ Target Margin Theater
Ticket Info
Tickets start at $30
More information: studio.abigaillevine@gmail.com
Excerpt
Six Quiet Dogs was developed with funding from the New York State Council on the Arts, Brooklyn Arts Council, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, Interlude Artist Support Grant, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Rehearsal Week, The Floor AIR program, Target Margin Theater, and the generous support of individual donors.
Header photo by Maria Baranova