A renowned gender theorist and a female drag performer move language and gestures as they trade stories and share bodywork. A gender-ambiguous performer and a trans and queer scholar volley moments of physical intensity and textual analysis in a lecture-demonstration format. These were just some of the ways that the fall 2017 Bridge Project’s Radical Movements festival challenged performance models for dialogic exchange and what constitutes a radical body in motion.

How does one choreograph a life? Sara (the smuggler) is an hour-long embodied monologue of Bay Area dance luminary and Contraband founder Sara Shelton Mann, conceived and crafted by Keith Hennessey for Mann’s 70th birthday. The work shares not an individual artist’s life so much as how life’s choreography writes an archive to be navigated, survived, and lived through.

Two recent choreographic works—Jeanine Durning's inging and Monique Jenkinson's Instrument —employ words not as content but as kinesthetic forces. In each, as audiences sit with their own embodied thoughts, words recede and silent questions arise to connect us in the space and time of performance.

Noémie Lafrance's newest site-specific work Home uses the body as both the performance site and the subject in question. This intimate work invites spectators to participate on a tactile level as we become aware of how the body creates spaces between life and death.