Accumulation follows a new mother as she strives to balance family life while staying engaged with her passion for dance during the pandemic. The piece moves through scenes of activities in the home and emotional variances of failure and success.

In 2006, the honky-tonks in Nashville were crowded with military from the surrounding army bases, batchelorette parties, musicians and regulars. In those honky-tonks I saw a convergence of social dancing - two step, line dancing, square dancing - with ‘bar swaying’. The footwork for this piece uses those forms for the lower body. The upper body adds modern dance concepts of fall / release and momentum.

The pathos of the piece is a nod to those servicemen, bartenders and other regulars I met in my year in Tennessee. There is a correlation of speed in the footwork with the idea that moving targets are harder to hit and therefore it is safer to keep moving. The speed correlates with not only physical safety, but mental safety in distraction at the honky-tonk.

Heavy These Days is a dance for the camera intimate love letter from a pregnant mother to the future. Graceful calming movements paired with prose unfold as she reflects on the life change about to come.

2 Peter is a solo created to reflect the early dawn and the hope and energy of a new day. The movements are focused around a desire for beauty, showcasing fluidity and a theme of growth. The feeling of cold in the morning before dawn inspired the starkness in the tone of the piece. The music by Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band is a mix of two versions of the same song blended together. The duplicate songs represent the slow transition of night into day when the moon is still visible as the sun is rising.

Woodblock Print, a duet between dancer Megan Harrold and guitarist Charlie Rauh, began from an anatomical perspective.  The piece starts by subtly exploring connective tissues, then moves into tsunamis of water based muscle tissue and ends with the industrial leavers of the joints. Out of this anatomical thinking comes a narrative sense of memory and hope for a brighter future. The music is structured like a memory unfolding. When you first hear the whole melody at the end of the piece, it is as if you have been humming it for years.

Bath Water is focused on a couple slowing falling out of love. We view this disintegration of intimacy through a ritual created during the height of their relationship: taking a bath together. The detailed and slow duet is based in body language. This piece has had three casts, with the couple being female/female and male/female.

The "Talking Cure" is a reference to Dr. Josef Breuer's term for talking therapy which was later adapted by Freud to describe the fundamental works of psychoanalysis. This piece uses 4 dancers, 2 musicians, and 1 house. Based in analyzing the comfort sensibilities of the rocking motion, the movement will explore romance and friendship while an installation of a house is built though the dance. As boundaries of home and community are constructed, a question is raised: How do we comfort and protect ourselves vs. other people?

Structured from the blueprint of the Nashville Public Library, this collaboration with Treeline Dance uses the method of transposition contextualized with footnotes. Each dancer represents a book and a corresponding room.  All five rooms and books have a section transposed into movement and music. The footnotes are the resulting concepts and investigative qualities that surround the transpositions with a place and time. Like experiential memories that become a lens for us to see the world, the books impacted how I saw the elements of performance: space, time, relationship, memory, and anatomy. Feel free to follow along with the footnotes or watch without.

In Paper Dress, Harrold uses paper as clothing, communication, and wish making. It begins as an intimate solo and ends by breaking the 4th wall between dancer and musician, changing the dynamic to a duet about lasting friendship.

Harrold and Rauh have been creating and working with a process they call the Transposition Method for 4 years. This method takes written works and translates them into movement and music by using the letters of the alphabet as a consistent unit of measurement. To create movement, Harrold uses three charts. One chart is for anatomy ( joints, organs, muscles, etc.). The second chart refers to spatial directions (cardinal, anatomical planes, degrees of rotation) and the third chart incorporates Laban action movements to suggest a how to. Each letter gets an anatomical, spatial, and action assignment that are combined into a movement. To create the music, Charlie builds a melody from the alphabet by using its letters as intervals on a musical scale. The resulting single line melody is them harmonized and set to rhythm. When Harrold and Rauh use this method, they are presenting the same material in two different mediums (music and dance) which are simultaneously connected through intent and detailed execution.

Pieces made using the Transposition Method include Greening, How Would I Rate the Quality, and Let Me Be Still.

Harrold and Rauh use this coded material to construct performance buildings. Instead of a piece having a climax, beginning and end, they think of the pieces as compositional structures made of rooms, hallways and floors.