Photo By Sam Polcer

Totally Other
The Yard (July 2015; August 2014) & Triskelion Arts (May 2014). Created and performed by Abby Bender and Cassie Tunick. Lighting by Andrew Dickerson. A visually visceral work intended to honor abandoned places - a particular room, or a particular room in our hearts, or a particular heart. From a gum-snapping teenage misfit to a dedicated scientist witnessing the extinction of a species, they grapple with love and loss in myriad forms. With dances stolen from vaudeville, songs borrowed from nature, and a vow of eccentric simplicity, secret exchanges grounded in deeply physical humor become a social event. Using a flawed barter system, the duo trade voices and histories, amplifying intimacy as they confront multiple disasters natural, personal and imaginary.

Photo By Peter Cunningham

Second Nature
Presented by Roulette (Next to Nothing - March 2013) & (The 13th Hour of the 26th Day - April 2014). Presented by Triskelion Arts (2011-2015, fifteen shows). Created and performed by Cassie Tunick, Heather Harpham, and Danny Tunick. Lights by Andy Dickerson. This musical/physical/vocal exposure of the present moment reveals what we’ve known all along – nothing happens for a reason. Next to nothing, there’s always something clamoring to exist. In these fully improvised performances, distinctly evolved narratives dovetail with intricate dances. Songs avalanche out of sound, morph into gestural architectures with a keen ear for broken rhythms and altered states of mind. The will-o’-the-wisp moment is made flesh in Second Nature’s ongoing exploration of the physical supernatural and the real-as-your-hometown macabre.

Photo By Angela Jimenez

No Country For Old Women
CAVE (2010), Triskelion Arts (2010-2011), Irondale Center (2010) Brooklyn Museum (2011). Created and performed by Cassie Tunick, Heather Harpham, Tanya Calamoneri. Music by Danny Tunick. These are fully improvised hour-long shows. From the interiors of sound to the exteriors of silence, we go riding through a visually surreal travelogue of the ordinary - made extraordinary by acute attention to sensory detail. Tales of brutal whimsy in strange lands. This is highly physical theater, steeped in a territory of red.

Photo By Ryan Jensen

Photo By Ryan Jensen   

Art of Memory
The Ontological-Hysterical Theater (July 2007) and 3LD Art & Technology Center, NYC (2009). By Company SoGoNo, conceived by Tanya Calamoneri, performed by Cassie Terman, Heather Harpham, Lisa Ramirez, and Tanya Calamoneri. Music: Miguel Frasconi, Set Design: Sean Breult, Lighting: Bruce Steinberg, Video: Ning Li. Four librarians trapped in a fantastical library search for an exit while creating elaborate physical games exploring memory and illusion. A dance/theater piece incorporating Butoh dance and Action theater, with texts inspired by Borges, Francis Yeats, the Bronte's, and Grimm's Fairytales. (see Press for reviews)

Photo By Christopher Pelham

The Smallest Country
CRS Theater, NY (2006), Theater Artaud, CA (2005), Los Angeles, CA (2006), performed by Cassie Terman and Shinichi Iova-Koga, and with Shahzad Ismaily and Keren Rosenbaum as musicians at CRS Theater, NY (2005/06). Improvisations played in a highly physical realm explore surreal yet utterly immediate worlds. Humor and pathos combine to reveal human experience through relationship and archetypal images. We incorporate the beauty and power of the physical body in space, and the intricacy of the psyche in time. Cohesive, delicate, unpredictable. (see Press for review)

Photo By Kfir Ziv

Blowing Steam
Symphony Space and Chelsea Art Museum, NY (2005). Performed with Keren Rosenbaum's Reflex Ensemble, a daring, thirty-five member, multi-national ensemble, brainchild of Israeli-born composer Keren Rosenbaum, that erases the boundaries between art, technology and live performance, with a unique inner logic and counterpoint between sound and vision.

Photo By Ian Winters

Citizen of Trees
Noh Space, San Francisco, CA (Jan-Feb 2004). Concieved and performed by Cassie Terman. Directed by Allen Willner, Set Design by Mary Lois Hare. Citizen of Trees is an allegory of safety and escape. Comedic and dark by turns, it exposes a map to freedom that is both unique to a pristine and primal world, and universal to the one we all inhabit. A dance of gestures sets the stage as innocence and violence morph into one another. A girl falls out of a boat and ends up alive on the sea floor. A ravaged man twists and breaks against the distinctions between desire and love. A woman flees an attacker only to be "saved" by being turned into a tree. She finds herself both trapped and released, and further required to offer her constantly changing testimony in a mysterious courtroom. (see Press for reviews)

The Duchess
By Eric Koziol and inkBoat. A film version of the performance work Cockroach, this film screened at Lincoln Center and the Getty (2001). Title role of the Duchess performed by Cassie Terman. Cockroach by Shinichi Momo Koga and inkBoat. San Francisco Butoh Dance Festival, Theater Artaud, CA and Schloss Broelin & Fabrik Potsdam, Germany (2001).

Photo By Eric Koziol

Ocean
Outdoor Site Specific Performance, Mendocino, CA (2000). With inkBoat.

Etiquette
With the company etiquette (Linda Carr, Mary Lois Hare, Cassie Terman), Performances took place 1998-2000 at Footworks, 848 Community Space, and ZEUM in California and at BMoCA in Colorado. Our trio used elaborate sets (boats, suitcases, 100 shoes), costumes, and music to create fully improvised evening length works that spoke to beauty, the surreal, and took a particularly odd and wild hilarity in the strange leanings of human behavior.

Photo By Mary Lois Hare