About Aretha & Ryan

Aretha Aoki and Ryan MacDonald have been collaborators for over a decade bringing their backgrounds in dance (Aoki), visual art, creative writing, and sound (MacDonald) together in conversation to make experimental, interdisciplinary performances that center themes of accumulation and emptiness, lineage, authorship, and the body as a medium for time/space travel. Their collaborative process is rooted in improvisation and a style that sometimes draws attention to itself and to the contradictions of movement. As such, each work is unique, and has included video, hyper-real animation, somatics, sculptural elements, musical theater, memoir, dance criticism, Noh theater and more in conversation with dance and sound-scapes. Since 2014, their work has touched on Aoki’s Japanese ancestry, creating formal containers and worlds for ancestral research. Aoki and MacDonald create work that, at times, withholds meaning, not to torment the viewers but to open their eyes to some of the workings of movement and sound, the attractive and radiating forces in each gesture as it continues to evoke other gestures, opposites, movements similar in operation or associated to it in memory.

arethaaoki.com

photo: Bates Dance Festival