CAITLIN ADAMS
Southern California native, Caitlin Adams is a director, choreographer, interdisciplinary artist, & teacher. She holds a BFA in Dance Performance, Choreography, and Critical Writing from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). Her work has been presented at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Prospect 4/New Orleans Art Biennale, REDCAT, Gibney Dance NYC, Triskelion Arts, Bates Dance Festival, Machine Project, Highways Performance Space, Human Resources LA, NYC Poetry Festival and NY Art Book Fair/Printed Matter. In June 2020, Adams was featured in an interview with BOMB Magazine ("Intuition is Bodily: Caitlin Adams Interviewed").
As a dancer, Adams has had the honor of working with choreographers Zoe Scofield, Kate Wallich, Daniel Charon, Colin Connor, Meryl Murman, Sean Greene, Ronald E. Brown, Denise Leitner, Doug Varone, Maya Caroll, and director, Lior Shamriz.
Adams has collaborated with classical and electronic composers, theater directors, filmmakers, opera singers, pop musicians, visual artists, writers, and performers of all kinds.
Before relocating to NYC, Adams organized Dynasty Center (2015-2017), a community space, performing arts' rehearsal studio, and DIY music venue, in Downtown Los Angeles' Chinatown.
In 2018, Adams moved to NYC, opened Caitlin Adams Studio, LLC and launched her professional dance company, HEIDCO which is a fiscally sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization.
Adams has taught dancers/movers of all ages in both New York City, and Los Angeles. Most recently, she began working alongside clinical psychologists, sharing a movement method she began developing in 2014 for people suffering with PTSD, body trauma and memory loss.
Her choreographic process lives amidst the intersection of action, imagination, inhibition and thought, and often works to identify the process of memory within disorientation/disassociation.
Caitlin Adams | HEIDCO is currently an artist in residency at The Floor Atlantic in Brooklyn, NY
ARTIST STATEMENT.
“As a director, I am interested in orchestration and amplification. If each medium involved in a project is one layer of reality, then my job is to tether them all together. In my work, I refuse to ignore anything. And I certainly refuse to believe that my reality is the only one at play.
I make work to understand the rhizomatic world as pluralistic at every moment. Even if I am sitting alone in a set, stage, gallery, et cetera, there are still conversations happening within the environment. The plants, the furniture, the history of the place itself, the amount of time I have spent there in comparison to the fresh eyes that will be entering are coalescing constantly. There are the artists journeying to the place we will all work together, and the conversations they are having individually in their minds. I have crafted a structure that is porous, vacillating within the crevasses of action, reaction, acknowledgment, and acceptance. This scaffolding frame the body of artists, like a home, encapsulating layers of reality, fantasy, and everything in between.
My goal is to listen at every moment and speak while listening. My goal is to take care and remember that art making can be a void of missed opportunities — the world I have built is structured to never miss those opportunities.
I aim to be one very large eye, holding a cohesive vision that crystalizes the parts to work independently. The truth is the role of direction is shared, and varies in everyone — I look to work with artists guided toward unpacking their personal directional abilities.
This gestalt is not an absolute but the result of nurturing every physical, metaphysical, and mental body.
I hold myself and all parts of myself accountable constantly as a director. And I ask my collaborators to do the same thing. I am excited to be challenged in ways I could never expect. I am surrounded by commitment to something greater, and larger than life. There is a hive intelligence that is possible in any work, and I am energized by the path there. The result of these high standards is palpable, penetrable, and precise.
My studio process initiates the birthing of a collective memory. The moment I begin a work is the moment a new body is developing, and this body has memory, bones, fluids, a life to accomplish, and a map to locate.
If I am aiming to create vast landscapes with candor from a multiplicity of personal experiences where everyone is visible, then I must be challenged to be quiet, to be loud, to negotiate, and mediate. I take my role in direction with solitude, seriousness, and jubilee. On the topic of peace, I am sensitive to my being a vessel generating a topographic body sculpting in collectivity.”
classes
Contemporary Improvisation and Instant Composition
Caitlin's contemporary class begins with technical devises, allowing a movement environment to unfold that focuses on peripheral awareness, rhythmic, dynamic intersection of spaces, and kinetic agreements within solo material, duets, and ensemble work. This class is not a free-form improvisational atmosphere but rather a technical, specific, and studied practice for the dancer hoping to gain embodied composition, in real time. Influences of ballet and classical modern dance guides us toward utilizing creative process as a tool for training. And, in the midst of focused work, we remember our sense of humor :)
Memory Tracking and Instant Composition
This movement workshop invites bodies of all interests, skill sets, and ages. We will explore the art, power, and healing attributes of movement. Through guided, imagery-based explorations and games, we will connect deeper with our memory while paying close attention to our bodily reactions. This will be a carefree, light-hearted, child-like space at times, but mostly we will internally examine the body's reaction to trauma, memory, pleasure and pain. This is deeply internal work.
You are not asked to speak, work in pairs or groups or do anything outside of your comfort zone. This is an expansive, transformative time to be with yourself, your body, your past, present, and future.
By working simultaneously with our intuitive and analytical body, Caitlin hopes to introduce a practice of dance that takes care of our emotional, physical, and ancestral memory.