ARTIST STATEMENT: My performances are existential musings on time and mortality. Rather than declare what you should do with the time you are given, I turn to archives, ephemera, and music to find evidence of how people previously contended with being alive. My eyes are always drawn to footnotes or citations that could be deemed “wastes of time”. The supposedly trivial, frivolous, superfluous, and therefore decidedly feminine and domestic, become the focus of my research. I, for example, may link 19th-century mental asylum architecture, the 1941 edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette, a recipe for linguine with clam sauce, and my body’s deficient potassium levels, and I insist that all these details hold meaning. By connecting my body and its physiological states to wider global phenomena and historical events, I seek to diagnose both myself and society. What really is wrong with all of us? In this diagnostic process I distill disparate information into data, translate that data into movement, and imbue those gestures with meaning. This collaging of data and physical routines is the heart of my choreographic process.

 

Propelled by an acute sense of time, my performances are precisely structured and meticulously timed. When collaborators appear in my work, we often move together in deliberate unison, reinforcing a sense of order and control. Self-consciously effortless perfection becomes a discipline, not unlike the routines women perform to sustain their families and homes. I am equally drawn to the quiet labor of waiting. To reflect this, I build moments of suspended expectation and anticipation into my performances, allowing audiences to witness objects slowly coming together. Assembly is part of the experience itself.

 

The expectations of entertainment inform the way I work with audiences. Using interactive sets, multimedia, and direct participation, I invite viewers into playful experiences. I don’t often ask them to participate but instead continue to remind them that they are, in fact, an audience. My works all question why I want them (need them?) to keep watching me. In one performance, audiences follow me on an eight-minute run and listen to the sound of my pre-recorded voice in headphones. In another, they smell and eat garlicky, creamy pasta in the setting of a faux cooking show. Alternating between sharing embarrassing or even traumatic stories and reciting an accumulation of random, mundane facts, I promise to never take myself too seriously. Instead I seek to disarm, giving you a moment to laugh and maybe even marvel at the absurdity of life.

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CONSULTING: Click HERE for more ... 

PRODUCTION: Amanda Hameline is a co-founder of the non-profit production company, Amanda + James. Amanda + James works to provide a space for a growing community of young artists to foster their creative drive, to refine ideas into finished productions, and to collaborate with their peers. The environment is interdisciplinary by nature, and the company strives to make conversation between rising artists from as many walks of life as possible. Amanda + James has presented dance, opera, theater, music and combinations of all these genres at Pioneer Works, National Sawdust, the Hotel Chelsea, Ars Nova, Bas Fisher Invitational, and many other venues from New York to Miami. Through Amanda + James, Amanda has also developed a curated interdisciplinary programs for emerging artists such as Pollinate and Dance +. 

BIO: Amanda has presented evening-length work and split-bills in venues across New York City including Kestrels, Coffey Street Studio, CPR-Center for Performance Research, National Sawdust, Coffey Street Studio, Dixon Place, Triskelion Arts, and Martha Graham Studio Theater; and in Berlin at Lake Studios. She has also developed site-specific pieces for a variety of non-traditional performance spaces such as Christie’s New York, Pace Gallery, the Chelsea Hotel and in Miami at RAW Pop Up and The Moore Building. Her film work has been featured in the Triskelion Dance Film Festival, ScreenDance Miami, and Exquisite Frame (Dance Place in DC).