choreography ~

Untitled (New Guardians) (2024-present)

An eclectic album of scores encompassing improvisational aspects and set forms, 'Untitled (New Guardians)' unfolds a strange, surprising sense memory of dances. dances on the street, in theatres, and on film, all carried forcefully and dreamily by a full band accompaniment of voice, drums, sax, and guitars. resting and wrestling with kinesthetic homes through improvisation and performance, three dancers reveal their individuality at the same time they actively listen and collaborate with one another. this work reminds us that when we walk in each other's shoes far from old homes, when we slow down to see each other, we become more and more ourselves.

Direction & Choreography by
Kirsten Michelle Schnittker

Performance & Choreography
Laura Bartczak, Kirsten Michelle Schnittker, Andrea Soto

Original Score by
‘Perfect Band’

We are forever grateful for the individuals who have donated to support the development of this work.

Guardians (2023)

In Guardians, postures of significance and uncharted relationship mingle. We explore loneliness; our constant emergence as individuals, leveraging aspects of representation; asking our audience to sit with their bodies' abilities of sensing and meaning making through attention. It is a dance containing many dances and created with performer Roxy Gordon. 

The continued development and creation of Guardians is made possible by the residency support of Basic Space LA and individual donors.

VERA NIKA (2022)

VERA NIKA is built upon what individuals have and what they can imagine. Our lineages and projections of learning how to be and how to do. 

From the unifying pulse of the simultaneous movements in time, to unplanned, unpredictable solo performers – exposed and timeless VERA NIKA is a performance that prioritizes processes of translation instead of acts of codification. As the performers shift from interpretation to failed interpretation and back again, it asks us to consider what is the original?

What echoes through each of us despite our differences? What form comes through? Where do we go together that we couldn’t go alone? Where is the dance taking us?

VERA NIKA is the static blur; copies of copies of copies; a morphing cloud. Signal and noise. It is for audiences to see what they want to see or nothing at all. 

clearing / 1 : 1 (2020) & clearing / 2 (2021)

clearing /1:1 was shown in a virtual Movement Research Open Performance on October 13, 2020 in collaboration with Elanor Boch.

clearing/2 was a performance created in collaboration with Tara Sheena.

Through a series of choreographic detours and intersections, it is a communal retelling of personal histories, in which the performers reconnect to themselves and in doing so connect with others.

clearing/2 in its current iteration takes some inspiration from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelations. Vivid and representational beings that continue to spark humanities’ imagination whenever we seem to face our oblivion. Forming the basis of stories told for centuries, offering regurgitations of social and individual catharsis. This also brings us to another four: grandparents and a person's process of learning about those four lives converging into them. The number four and all the ways it shows up, is both comforting in its balance and unsettling in its stalemate.

First Performer: Alarm will sound (2019)

First Performer is an offering of unrehearsed personhood that is part dance portrait, part meditation on the power of numbers and symbols/symbolic markers, part inquiry into how we make ourselves, and how we become visible, or cease to be visible to each other.

Beginning with a cycle of preparations and “almost-performances” a performer is observed in a liminal space or passageway, thinking, determining, assembling, retreating, attempting, but never truly quelling their expression. The urgent pursuit of self-articulation is vivid in the way the performer attacks action with focus and then as abruptly drops it again. They are exhausted by their own tools and tropes, and begin to entangle themselves in the wider presence of each moment, implicating environment and witness as fodder for action. They draw the audience ever closer as their experiences and meaning-making mingle…in this unstable togetherness can the performer find their most expressive strength?  

Reviewology (2019)

Inside a sterile, womb-home two antiheros meet to make sense existence. They watch an ancient video that asks: A new way to spend eternity? They wonder. They chant and dance and bathe in light to find an organic transcendence together. They crave connection to themselves, each other and nature -- represented through videos They found on their iphones. Surely moving together rehashing movement again and again They can discern the hidden message? The answers to their questions? 

A performance and  installation, Reviewology is set in a virtual future where individuals live detached from community and the natural world, the work takes an earnest, sometimes comically strange look at human search for connection and meaning.

New Performer (2017)

New Performer is anti-generalization (standard narrative, group dynamics, symbolism) and pro-specificity (a reality of you and me). Is it possible to “not-perform”? Searching for what is next, the dancers will find comfort in outright attempts at movement, image-making, presence, language. But, they will also attempt to find a state of “not-performing,” a balancing act of subtlety to slip you self-aware moments. Do you see them? They gaze out at you, too. Are you seen? 1 or 2 dancers, 4 or 7 or 10 minutes counting down. Embrace the collective successes and failures in the pursuit of being together.  A process to change the way a performer operates creating a new model of a performance / performance that thinks, that determines its parts, assembles and disassembles them, conducts tests / that asks for intimacy, empathy, and acceptance of failure.

A social image-making experiment and research component of New Performer is found at the Instagram account @newperformer where the performers shared intimate self-portraits performed as selfies and locating intersections of image, identity, reality, and performance.

Revival: a feartool tale of two (2017)

Revival took aim at the problematic nature of combining friendship with collaboration. Where does the naval-gazing end and also, where does the enabling end? 

In picking up previously abandoned choreography and assembling it into snappy vignettes evoking everything we love (and love to hate) about dance, we consider the origins of our presumptions of what is good and what is bad, as well as friendship. Things start to bubble up out of such sincerity, and we found ourselves facing off with our backwoodsman hired hand, our still-tender adult disillusionment, preoccupying thoughts about our own indoctrination via the Pledge of Allegiance, a laissez-faire approach to sexual expression, dance world social angst, and, finally, a deep hopefulness that the magic we find in being together can be extended outward into the universe making us, and everything, ok.

Yours And Our Devices (2015)

A dance that walked the line between equalizing connection and alienation through gaze in performance. When a viewer’s gaze is confronted with the direct gaze of a performer, what happens? 

Across a series of fragments, YAOD weaved together overt displays of “self-fashioning” and “performing identity” with revealing moments of the performers’ experience of themselves, from discomfort and uncertainty to pleasure and confidence. 

YAOD showed audiences the humanity of vulnerability, the power of gaze in shaping understanding and connection to one another, the slipperiness of controlling self-image and identity, and the inner, individual, and intimate experience of live performance. 

solo (study) in a corner (2013)

A site responsive collaboration with performer Isabella Hreljanovic for AUNTS @ Arts Renaissance Residency and Performance.

girl/plot (2013)

Drawing inspiration from Wayne Theibaud’s Two Kneeling Figures - a vibrantly colored, but emotionally and narratively stark portrait of two women in bathing suits - and impressions of the ambitious, busy, straddling, encompassing, young, twenty-something dancemakers - girl/plot sets in motion processes of discovery and dead ends imagined inside a enclosed, tiny setting in a single day. They will grapple with elements of presentation. Costume - what they wear and how they wear what they wear - Environment - what and how they create and interact with space/objects - Presence - awareness of inner and outer presence by themselves, with another person and to the outside the window world.

Performed as part of the Roger Smith Hotel’s Introducing Series, curated and co-produced by Rooftop Dance, at The Window at 125.

uuhhh dance (2012)

In uuhhh dance I present myself to the audience half dress and immediately regret it. Wait. Why I am I doing this?

uuhh dance is a solo, but one that could never be danced in a room without an audience. Instead of performing recognizable dance choreography, I compose a dance through the unpacking of my dance training and performance experience. How far can I push past the normal rules and routines of performance?   Every thought and feeling is physicalized — the intensity of my initial vulnerability is hard to shake; I find plenty of  uncertainty and frustration, and eventually give way to the pleasure of movement and the pleasure of being watched. I keep returning to the importance the audience. I want them to be as aware as I am of the tether between us.

the process thing (2012)

After a succession of showings, the the pretty thing became something else. Kirsten and Katie performed a duet that examined aspects of audience assumption and expectation and exposing the process of doubt and uncertainty experienced by a choreographer.

"We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under. The first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public...The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. They are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners...Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love...And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers."

-Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

the pretty thing (2011)

Performed by  |  Amie Segal, Katie Stricker, and Kirsten Schnittker

About the work  |  After conducting interviews with my dancers that sought to expose each dancer’s most important relationships and their past, present and future aspirations, we embarked on a 6 month rehearsal process in which we explored ways of performing our personal narrative.  We began to play with the juxtaposition of formalized, structured movement and unclassifiable gestural movement, experimenting with how we display aspects of our personalities. The work questions if what we see on stage is actually  a “representation” of action.  “Performing” bodies intermingle with “being” bodies, leaving it to the audience to decide what they are seeing. The work is an uncovering and an exposure of performer which challenges aesthetic symmetry, narrative, and even dynamic movement, things that we consider "good" or "beautiful."