“Garfield’s work is resonantly individual, defiantly uncategorizable, an emanation of things deep within.”
Choreography
Choreography is a vehicle for dancing. I don’t care about beginnings, middles and ends necessarily. Structures should be interrupted. Phrases are convenient and can be found in many grocery aisles. Everything can be included - the opposite choice is also valid, good dances and bad dances do not exist. I am in the same room as you. I can see you. The light spills over. You are sitting mostly, I am moving mostly. It could be said that we are all in this together. I notice air currents around me and within me, patches of coolness, patches of warmth. I do things I don’t know how to do. All balance is an exchange between falling and catching. Both actions are. I start each moment in the dance where I left off. Sometimes I begin again. Sometimes I stop. Eventually I stop. The dance may be felt to continue. – KG
Perfect Piranha
2017
“When Ms. Garfield begins the work by telling the audience, “None of us can do this on our own,” you might wonder if her tongue is in her cheek. But when the work ends with the dancers turning in a circle, hand in hand as the lights fade, it’s pretty clear that she means it. This is not a war dance. It’s more like prayer”
Perfect Piranha moves in circles through ineffable strands of shady movement to fully-articulated declarative dancing. It emerges as an uninterrupted flow of continuous movement, veering between a whisper and a roar. Perfect Piranha gives sway to mixed emotions, evaporating patterns, and exclamatory physicality with vaudevillian flourishes. The dance concludes in an immaculate outpouring – Mandala – a dance within a dance. Mandala is an intricate ascending spiral that serves as soulful completion.
Winston Churchill said, “All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.” What can be expressed is simple. What cannot be expressed is most urgent. What if there are no words yet for what we are living through? Meaning accrues – intonation, accumulation of speed, diminishing space, hate speech, embodied listening, sublime utterance – who are we now? I hit you and you hit me is one way to communicate. Inchoate and tentative, we turn away. A Piranha’s teeth are serrated, sharp as blades, and ideal for shearing and tearing flesh. A veneered smile is heralded as indication of how smart and happy a person is. Let’s turn back, reach deep into our subterranean hearts, and remember who we can be. Imagine a piranha’s strong jaw and teeth closing in, and turn towards this awareness. Snap! Wake up! We struggle with what we have made. Let’s start over. Compassionate and in accord, we turn… None of us can do this alone. - KG
“The dancers’ movements chafe against the music: their movements are militant, violent. Outstretched limbs swipe like windshield wipers; feet stomp to keep a threatening beat that recurs throughout the performance. When the dancers start to sing, “So glad to see you, hello!” it reads not as ironic, but unsettling. The blend of imperfection and beauty is apparent.”
Pow
2016
“Anything by the choreographer Keely Garfield is worth watching multiple times. There is so much to see, so much to delight in and puzzle through, that once is rarely enough!”
“Ms. Garfield reveals something fragile, heroic and intimate about the body, on its own and in relation to others.”
Pow –“How is it when the tree withers and the leaves fall?” asks the student. The master replies, “Body exposed in the golden wind.” – Blue Cliff Record Koan
My dancing body is always exposed to the golden wind, which means there is no protection, none anywhere. Dancing is a flim flam, simply a wind moving through that carries you aloft, alighting here and there. It is beautiful and rare and painful and is ultimately just another way for me to know myself and the world. A kick in the head. An invitation to shine through and wake the fuck up. Pow! – KG
Pow is a Frankenstein of a dance in which elements of other acclaimed dances Garfield has made are radically re-configured, sutured, amplified, and left to run amok creating a shocking new version of events.
Featured Press
WOW
2014
“Full-out and entirely sincere dancing, the uplift is irresistible. Wow, you feel, wow.”
It is no laughing matter that cynicism and scorn have seeped into our bones. Our good hearts desire more, but we are made powerless by puns, and our powerlessness is what we feel instead of the gravity of our situation. Meanwhile people go missing, guns go off, resources are hoarded, and the world heats up - What is our sincerely held hope for each other, for the whole planet?
“Wow is an act of disruption, an unmasking with occasional masks, a mouthful of Pop Rocks, a baptismal immersion in feelings that continuously build, ebb and build again.”
In a dramatic act of sincerity WOW deploys a panoply of performance devices – pantomime, musical theatrics, back-up dancing, faux pas-de-deux - to protest its case. Set to songs by Kate Bush performed live by Matthew Brookshire and the company. Bring in the clowns! Love is all there is! - KG
Telling the Bees
2013
“A rare dynamism enriches the lucid choreography. We could watch this all night.”
The custom of telling bees when their beekeeper died, was believed to keep bees from absconding or even dying, and encourage their affiliation with a new beekeeper. This tradition assumes a reciprocal relationship between animals and humans, past, present and future, and the lines of life and death. Telling The Bees examines the waggle and round dances of honeybees, their cooperative societies, the honeyed results of their toil and the sting of breakdown in our own organizing principles.
Featured Press
I burgered the King
It was a whopper time
We had a proper time
And the Queen asked me, “What will it be?
High fructose corn syrup or sugar with your tea?
- KG
Twin Pines
2011
“Garfield seems to have flung open the doors to some wild inner room of the imagination. How delicious it is to peer into this space, where fairy tale, domestic satire, dark humor and the absurd jostle uneasily.”
Two trees walk into a forest; one says to the other, “We’ll never make it out alive!” Twin Pines gets lost in thought and tries to think its way out the same way you might if you got lost in the woods. Garfield sat quietly listening to the deafening “jack hammer” of noise emanating from a densely packed mind during a silent retreat. Moment-to-moment murder, and mayhem were committed followed by elation and ennui. Here and there, space like a clearing. Twin Pines produces a scenic version of events as the protagonists wrangle and forage a middle path around the root causes of desire and dread. Episodes spontaneously arise, and ultimately dissolve entirely in this “epic” pantomime.
Two trees walk into a forest; one says to the other, “We’ll never make it out alive!” Twin Pines gets lost in thought and tries to think its way out the same way you might if you got lost in the woods. Garfield sat quietly listening to the deafening “jack hammer” of noise emanating from a densely packed mind during a silent retreat. Moment-to-moment murder, and mayhem were committed followed by elation and ennui. Here and there, space like a clearing. Twin Pines produces a scenic version of events as the protagonists wrangle and forage a middle path around the root causes of desire and dread. Episodes spontaneously arise, and ultimately dissolve entirely in this “epic” pantomime.
Featured Press
“The dancing in Twin Pines takes the form of carefully shaped journeys delineating the space around the marvelous performers; sometimes it flails the air. Mysteries abound. In this analogy to the growth and formation of human emotions, trunks also crack and fall, and seeds produce strange offspring. The thread Garfield would have us follow (or not), veers, tangles, disappears, and pops up transformed. A serious story masquerades as rainy-day games in the mind’s attic.”
Limerence
2009
“Keely Garfield has been on a phenomenal tear in recent years, creating work that seems always on the verge of plunging off a cliff — you watch spellbound, waiting for the car to crash and burn in spectacular fashion. Somehow, though, she always makes the curve. ”
The root of our desire for connection with another is at the heart of our longing for union with something greater than the self. In Limerence, this gap is felt. We peer into half-glimpsed places as figures move towards and away from each other. Shadows are brought to light, music stirs the soul, and soap-operatic tendencies are displayed since “Love is a human religion in which another person is believed in.”
I manifested lots of weird fishes
with weird lights that go on and off
not predictably.
Deep undermycurrent
they swim up me and out my eyes.
Can a fish love a bird?
no
no
no
fish go deep…
- KG
Featured Press
“Years after I watched Ms. Garfield’s “Limerence” It’s atmosphere of brooding inchoate madness still lingers in my mind. Her work is resonantly individual, defiantly uncategorizable, an emanation of things deep within.”
“Keely Garfield’s Limerence could be the Cliff Notes to poet Gary Snyder’s line: “The pointless wars of the heart.” It draws blood. And if you’re like me, it takes a night of fitful sleep before you realize how badly you’ve been cut. This woman is dangerous.”
Disturbulence
2005
“Disturbulance serves as a metaphor for emotional paralysis while bringing to mind American isolationism – what many see as an inability or refusal to look beyond borders. Sex and politics may make for uneasy bedfellows, but Garfield’s ragged vision makes room for both.”
Sometimes it’s not what you say, it’s what you don’t say that has the most impact. Small movements indicate incredibly large things. I wanted to shout and whisper at the same time. There is a sense that all change is precipitated by a disturbance of energy that percolates just beneath the surface and can cause a kind of paralysis. Finding a way toflow back into life is key. - KG
Disturbulence is about separation anxiety as both a personal and political phenomenon. In passages of architectural dancing that are highly organized, and immediately disrupted, two figures meticulously measured movements lay bare the onset of disturbance, and the duration of turbulence. At once transparent and mysterious, Disturbulance is stripped of narrative, instead bringing essential elements into extreme focus. Disturbulance is etched against original music composed by Marc Ribot.
“Garfield’s fans admire her canny mingling of dark humor and pathos, which reveals itself in arresting images…(Disturbulance is) a psychosexually taut duet in matching red-and-white striped dresses that make the dancers look like flappers-cum-Chrysler Buildings – or like tremulous American flags.”
The heart spurned
The castles burned
The world turned
Fuck all learned
Scent of Mental Love
2005
“A jewel of a duet accompanied by the humorous songs of accordionist Rachelle Garniez performed live…Garfield’s choreography is never forced following the ebb and flow of a relationship with surprising, often awkward partnering and plenty of stillness, as (the dancers) glare at each other with a mixture of tenderness and frustration.”
You can become entranced by the way a person’s glove leaves a tiny gap at the wrist? I wanted to make those small glimpses, those in-between spaces, visible, very large so that they almost overwhelm the dancing. Amidst all the partnering, the most intimate moments are revealed when the dancers are not touching. Somehow, you have a sense that you should not be looking at this secret thing. Movement pushes certain buttons. - KG
Scent Of Mental Love is a rigorously pre-arranged faux pas-de-deux that succumbs to the seduction of a suggested relationship while simultaneously unveiling it’s choreographic conceits and constructs. Painstakingly wrought, the duet is permeated by Rachelle Garniez’ brutally original songs ranging from bittersweet blue-grass laments to obstreperous waltzes.
