ABYSS is a scalable, iterative, and site responsive, physical and sonic performance intervention that creates conduits for collective grief processing and examinations of the ways we perform ourselves in club culture and social gathering spaces.

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The work examines our bodies (abysses) ontological and somatic communication with vibration, groove, physical labor, absurdity, power and release. ABYSS is a practice of instigating our bodies to be a site of change and protest within a burning world.

In this work, efforted acts of physicality, textural states, illusion, and transformation assisted by the use of performers' hoodies represent growth, decay, power, tension and release. Performers physically burn themselves out and find themselves in prolonged stillnesses. In this stillness, smoke from micro-foggers embedded into the performers' hoodies fill their forms and spill out from their faces. They become the immolated phoenix, burning down to begin again. These expressions of weight and labor are accompanied by a live experimental electronic sound score by slowdanger.

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ABYSS is a performance practice and methodology in embodying the apocalypse.

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ABYSS has been supported by Pittsburgh Parking Authority, Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival, Point Park University, Springboard Danse, Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership with generous support from Citizens Financial Group. ​