member profile

Heidi Duckler Dance Theatre (formerly Collage Dance Theatre) is a nonprofit, site-specific dance performance company based in Los Angeles, California. We seek non-traditional venues and methods for creating contemporary dance theatre works that seek new forms of relationship between audience and performer. In developing our choreography, we draw strongly on the history, community, and architecture of each performance site. We actively seek collaborations with artists, arts organizations, and community groups in order to forge a link between professional performance, public space and audience. Under Heidi Duckler’s direction, our choreographic practice is based on a response to our surroundings, the physicalizing of concepts, and the development of organic movement phrases that express the psychological relationship between people and their environment. Our site work is not fixed or static. We organize space with an eye to relationship—between buildings, objects, people and ideas. Often it is taken for granted that a space has one use. Stairs are meant for climbing to the next floor. Beds are made for sleeping and dreaming. But if the function is not the primary concern, how else do we connect to space, what else might be essential? In both our large scale works such as Sleeping with the Ambassador performed at the Ambassador Hotel, and our non-heroic works presented at laundromats, we create choreography that both responds to a space and at the same time undermines our assumptions regarding its original function. We may approach an architectural or culturally significant site—such as the L.A. Police Academy, the L.A. River or any historic space that has never before been considered for a dance performance—and create a dance that animates this space in unexpected ways. We are interested in creating works that explore the vast under-realized potential that a space has for movement and meaning. Heidi Duckler Dance Theatre strongly feels that a performance does not exist without its audience. Over many years we have looked for ways to engage our audience in a way that extends beyond traditional spectatorship. We are curious about what happens to an audience during a performance when the rules are not a given. We explore ways in which the audience engages in the “work” of the performance. This does not necessarily mean the audience interacts with the performance. It may mean that the audience has been privy to the process of creation and witnesses a performance that has unfolded in their presence. This is why many of our rehearsals are open to the public. Our audience is affected by the arrangement of the space, but how does the audience decide what to see? Our live performances have multiple vantage points, complex and layered, as an audience travels into and through the space. The audience makes decisions about their participation, conscious or not, and this personal point of view informs their ultimate experience. As we bring an audience into a performance site, they may feel the trace of something formerly present—the everyday life that the building once held. The place is not in motion like it was previously and this felt absence is part of the experience. This felt absence is memory. Memory plays an important role in site work. After a show, the performance itself then adds another history to the space where the residue of image and metaphor is left behind.