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By Sarah Cecilia Bukowski
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Published on April 18, 2025
Chloe London's "Unstable Sky." Photo: Robert London Photography
Unstable Sky at Triskelion Arts
Choreography by Chloe London, in collaboration with the performers
Performers: Tim Bendernagel, Miranda Lawson, Chloe London, Mia Martelli, Maddy Sher
Sound composed by Ryan Wolfe, featuring Tree Palmedo on trumpets
Lighting Design by Anna Wotring
Costume Design by Leanne Budreau and Chloe London
Dramaturgy by Alexander Davis
April 12, 2025
Everybody wants something new, right? The desire for the “new” drives everything from capitalist consumer culture to utopian imaginaries, and accordingly has some bearing on creative impulses in the dance ecosystem. Contemporary dancemakers can come up against the imperative of the “new” from funders and audiences hungry for evidence of productive innovation, often at the expense of slower, deeper processes of learning through repetition and reiteration. But in the day-to-day reality of dancemaking, very little is “new” — even in a first meeting between collaborators, or in the first minutes of the first rehearsal, each individual carries their histories into the recombinatory process of making a dance. So what if we debunk the myth of the “new work”? If there’s nothing “new” in a “new work,” what might we experience instead?
Choreographer Chloe London invites these questions into Unstable Sky, a world she opens for herself and four collaborating performers to explore ideas of repurposing and transformation through acts of revision and collage. The material of the 50-minute dance draws from five solos from London’s previous work and assembles them with pointed compositional acuity into a “new” group work. The resulting movement landscape preserves individual textures and expressive registers while allowing the dancers and their environment to blossom through juxtapositions and cross-pollinations.
The work ranges widely but holds together through formal devices that echo across its movement, sound, and design elements. Ryan Wolfe’s electronic score explores sound worlds that throb and prickle in layered ebbs and flows, shot through with the haunting vibrance of Tree Palmedo’s trumpets. Pulsating rhythms move between springy and sustained to provide drive, tension, and contrast for the dancers’ explorations. Departures abound yet motifs recur, like a cascade of descending scales that becomes a portal into the space of memory. Wolfe’s aptitude for auditory coloring extends to many shades of darkness: ominous depth or quiet refuge, thick with industrial cacophonies or rounded harmonies.
London articulates the individuality of each dancer while creating a unified yet ever-changing visual field for their interactions. Costumes by London and Leanne Budreau swath each dancer in diaphanous color signatures—lavender, seafoam, scarlet, evergreen—overlaid on a unifying palette of warm, shimmering metallics that range from burnished gold to sparkling champagne, while London appears and reappears in five distinct arrangements of structured and flowing all-white garments. Anna Wotring’s lighting design plays with this array of colors and textures through floods of warm, hazy light and sudden descents into darkness, tinged red by exit signs. Dancers flash past a gap in the black upstage curtain, at times widening or narrowing the portal to bring into question the stability of the visible: Which parts of the dance do we see, and which parts might remain unseen?
The structure of Unstable Sky speaks directly to its explorations of originality and repurposing, as London sandwiches a series of five sequential solos for herself between accumulative group compositions for her four collaborators. An opening solo for Miranda Lawson functions as a point of departure and interjection as dancers flicker out of dark corners or scurry briefly across the stage. Group encounters take shape as assemblages of disparate solos and splashes of unison duets—Mia Martelli and Maddy Sher are often and aptly paired—pierced and triangulated by phrases and themes from other dancers. Gestures that arise in solos ping through the group: in one motif, they stride slowly on half toe as the parallel uprights of their forearms sweep back and forth, back and forth before their faces. Tim Bendernagel’s steadfast strength reverberates through a flurry of contrasts: heavy footfalls, radiant releases, and sculptural poses in unexpected configurations of limbs and joints. Theirs is a world of more tension than repose, yet movement is never frantic: jumps land with solid assurance, gestures inscribe well-defined shapes with clear origins and endpoints, daring the edges yet never falling off the rails.
London’s own solos give a full sense of her kinesthetic instincts and distinctive choreographic and dancerly signatures. At once pliant and taut, she invites and receives dynamic shifts of level and impetus to weave a complex tapestry of movement. As she enters through a side door, a shaft of bright green light penetrates the space; she hurtles repeatedly in and out of the open door for quick costume changes between solos. Each reappearance brings new tones of movement, sound, and intention as London launches her body through the thrills of flight and intricate foldings of floorwork, guided always by moment-to-moment calibrations of the speed and direction of her gravitational center. She collapses and expands with resilient elasticity and cuts through space with easy power in a display of unforced virtuosity and undisguised effort. As she exits and the group returns, her extended interjection colors their recurrence: clad now in golds and whites, they flock and orbit through near misses and brief moments of light contact to leave individual and collective traces in the air.
The cast clearly speaks the same language of somatically-inflected contemporary dance that harnesses weight, momentum, and stillness toward a clear, unaffected athleticism. Their frank presentation is neither confrontational nor opaque; we see them in attitudes of honest contemplation and conversation in motion. Their eyes are particularly alive—London is a strongly visual dancer whose gaze seems to project simultaneously inward and outward at all times to orient herself in her body and her world. Through this emphasis on seeing, the dancers lean into their consciousness of themselves as beings subject to visual perception, both their own and ours. Above all, their gazes see each moment anew—the dance, their bodies, themselves made new again and again, and always. So is there nothing “new” in dance, or is everything somehow new?
