DANCEROULETTE is a festival of performing artists working within movement, sound, spatial design, visual cacophony, choreography, improvisation, ephemerality, and theatrical re-imagining.

Maggie Bennett in collaboration with Bryan Eubanks
Bessie McDonough-Thayer “Tender Bings”

Maggie Bennett in collaboration with Bryan Eubanks

Bennett and Eubanks overlap solo pieces dealing with surface and vibration.  They are interested in the construction and emergence of atmosphere, and will play with the co-existence and disappearance of physical bodies (sound and human) in time, space, and in the sonic and material landscapes they create.
Maggie Bennett is a choreographer/ performer and installation artist whose work explores an intersection between the body, landscape and architecture through choreographic installation and cross-disciplinary collaboration. She was an artist in residence at Dance Theater Workshop through Fresh Tracks Series (2008) and a Studio Series Residency (2011), and she was a 2009/2010 Movement Research Artist in Residence. Other residences include Location One (NYC), FACADE/FASAD (Brooklyn), Pieter psad (L.A.), The Broken Neck/ No Idea Festival (Austin, TX), Ritual and Research (Worthington, MA), and The New Museum (NY).  She has engaged in on-going collaborative work with visual artist Liliana Dirks-Goodman, and sound artist Chris Cogburn.

Bessie McDonough-Thayer “Tender Bings”

In the solo Tender Bings, Bessie embodies specific tasks that lead her to states of exhaustion and test her capacity for exacting repetition. Once inside these structures, she endeavors to transform herself while recognizing the futility and humor of the task.

Bessie McDonough-Thayer is a dancer and choreographer currently living in Brooklyn. She graduated from Smith College in 2003 with a degree in dance and Italian, and has been living in New York ever since. She was the Open Performance coordinator for Movement Research from 2007-2010, and enjoys making work and collaborating with artists and friends in different fields and from diverse backgrounds. Currently she collaborates with Laurie Berg and has shown work at Dixon Place in New York, 303 Gallery in Chelsea, the Catch Series at the Bushwick Star, Movement Research at Judson Church, WiM Festival at TBG Theater, and CounterPulse in San Francisco.

Dance Roulette is made possible by the Mertz Gilmore Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.