ABOUT THE RESIDENCY
Set in the near future where today’s most recognizable and plentiful creatures are now sharing ecosystems and fighting for financial aid to protect their kind, an extravagant competition is created by a host who is trying to stay relevant while she gives the community (i.e. the audience) the power to make life-altering decisions. Endangered Species will tell the story of three threatened species: a Rambouillet Sheep, North American Raven and a Pilot Whale. The use of text and dance movement is utilized as each species shares their story with the audience and fights for the protection of their species. Currently, each faces unique environmental issues that threaten to quickly wipe out their entire species. However, though these environmental events are defined as different (i.e. contamination, pesticides in nesting environments, animal slaughterhouses), they are all interconnected. “Endangered Species” encapsulates how the characters are deeply intertwined in varying relationships while each having distinct back stories and personalities informed through scientific data, mythology and stereotypes.
Content Warning: Endangered Species includes sensitive subject matter including references to sex, violence, and content regarding assisted suicide.
CREATIVE TEAM
Kelly Ashton Todd (she/her)—Creator, Story Developer, Director, Choreographer
Ria Meer (she/they)—Story Developer
Truth Colon (she/they)—Performer
Stephanie Crousillat (she/they)—Performer
Ingrid Kapteyn (she/her)—Performer
Tori Sparks (she/her)—Performer
John Pete Hardy (he/him)—Costume and Mask Designer
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kelly Ashton Todd is a director, choreographer, performing artist, and environmental activist who makes work for both live theater and film. Her work explores land and human exploitation, environmental politics, and surrealism. She received a BFA in Modern Dance from Texas Christian University and a Double Minor in Biology and Environmental Science (2011) along with a Master’s in Sustainability Leadership from Arizona State University (2021). Todd performed with the award winning off-Broadway show Sleep No More from 2015–2022. Todd’s choreography has been showcased globally. She has presented work at Kaufman Hall at the 92nd st Y, Dixon Place, NOoSPHERE Arts, ‘T’ Space Rhinebeck, Usine C, and Meow Wolf Santa Fe. She has been awarded the Brooklyn Arts Council Grant (2019, 2020, and 2022), Jerome Hill Foundation Finalist, F21 NYSCA in Media Grant, Puffin Foundation Grant, LEIMAY Fellowship, Human Impacts Institute Environmental Health Fellowship, NYFA Fellowship in Choreography, and Emerging Choreographer for Springboard Danse Montreal 2022. She was a panelist for the United Nations in 2023 where she spoke to the intersection of climate change, female empowerment, and technology. Her award-winning environmental dance film series, Under Review, has attended over 20 film festivals nationally and internationally.
BAC OPEN STORY
World Enough and Time: Kelly Ashton Todd’s Endangered Species
by Lizzy Straus
When I first write to Kelly Ashton Todd about sitting in on rehearsals for Endangered Species, the piece she and four performers are creating during her residency at Baryshnikov Arts Center, she writes back almost immediately, get in the room with us!
I quickly learn that for Todd—a director, choreographer, and performer whose interdisciplinary experience includes immersive theater, dance, film, and performance art works—the room is more than a room. It is a place artists make together.
Four Walls
Entering the Rudolf Nureyev Studio, I am struck first by the raw, monumental architecture of the space itself. A mix of functional and grand, with bare concrete and rigged lights and walls of sky-high windows that give onto the city, prism-bright with its own layers on layers of glass and steel and stone.
As the performers come in, finding places to change and stretch, the late-fall sun slants down and makes two mirrors, two other selves for each of them: a long shadow and a surprisingly clear reflection in the surface of the floor. Everything about them—their mammal warmth, their kinetic energy, even their shadows—creates a contrast with the construction and geometry of their surroundings.
Almost without speaking, they find space to lie down, ready to warm up.
Getting in the Room
Todd leads them through a series of breath, movement, and vocal exercises, encouraging them to explore different levels of bodily tension and specificity, different emotional states and intentions. These seem to me immensely private moments of artistic reflection and the differences in the performers’ physical instincts are striking, but they share an abandon, an immersion in the process that gives even these preparatory moments the spell-casting quality of a performance. They generate a kind of collective privacy that allows them to be at once totally alone and together.
Todd watches them closely, moving between and through them, cueing them to say their own names. To embody different words with movements and vocalizations. Humiliate, ravage, dazzle. She asks them to say hi, how are you as though they’re celebrating. As though seeking revenge. They find different levels and axes, from prone to kneeling to standing on tiptoe. I’m struck by another paradox: how small they look in the space, how completely they fill it.
They pair off for an exercise where one person closes their eyes and the other leads by touch in an improvised duet. They dance by turns wildly, sweetly, violently—rolling on the floor, turning arm in arm, lifting each other, coming slowly together, crossing the room with explosive speed. I forget they cannot both see. I forget they are making it up as they go. I get that good theater feeling—the feeling I’m witnessing something that will never happen again the same way. After a time, Todd directs them to isolate and they come to stillness but don’t separate. She says, feel, feel, feel before anything happens.
When they open their eyes they are giddy, embracing, reflecting. In my notebook I write, What does isolate mean? I write, What dearness. What care.
The Stage is a Stage
The premise of Endangered Species is a competitive spectacle, a beauty pageant/dog show hybrid in which the contestants—animal representatives from the realms of the air, sea, and land—compete for financial aid to save their species. The host of the event, a representative from the human realm, invites the audience to join in evaluating them: their bodies, their talents, and finally the stories of how they came to the brink of extinction. The audience is the audience whether they like it or not. Spoiler alert: the sheep wins, but the pageant ends badly—violently—for the host.
Towards the Monster
As they begin to mark and rehearse sections of the piece, Todd directs, counts in, and coaches, but sparsely, in a way that reflects her experience working with each of the performers and the trust they’ve built together on this project. In the room.
She uses a shorthand with them that is in many instances post-verbal, almost animal itself—sounds, tongue clicks, hand gestures. It is plain from the way they discuss and explore each other’s ideas they’re delighted to be making this work together. That they feel empowered to zig and zag in the making, and that they feel safe enough to encounter not just the elegance and pathos, but the ugliness and violence in their characters. At one point Todd says go towards the monster. Says, let us see your demon shape.
It is an important bit of physical and emotional direction in the development of a piece that explores (rapidly, deftly) the brutality of the human will to power, our casual, even gleeful exploitation of resources and destruction of the environment, our role in the mass slaughter, endangerment and extinction of species, our insatiable appetite for stories of pain and suffering—even those in which we are implicated—and of course, our morbid instinct towards spectacle, competition, and pageantry in the face of moral horror.
Lowering the Mask
They begin a run through and I am struck in particular by the moment when the three performers playing animals, raven, whale, and sheep, first drop into character, lowering their heads to reveal beautiful masks, and finding raven-ness, whale-ness, sheep-ness with their bodies in a way that feels uncanny and acrobatic. It is better than a magic trick. Each offers an undeniable expression of their animal, but with a light touch, and without for a moment losing their own human-ness, dancer-ness.
When I ask her about it later, Todd will credit the performers, who largely devised their own solos and collaborated on the duets and trios. She’ll say, we’re all choreographers in the room. She’ll say they did research on each animal, exploring the stereotypical edges of raven behavior, of whale behavior, of sheep behavior, working backwards towards human, looking for the moment of embodiment that inspires empathy.
This double embodiment, this ability to hold both human and animal truths, is what makes this work so compelling. Throughout the spoken scenes, small solo dances, and larger moments of movement in unison, the performers continue to find gestures that blend the two—often moments of sweetness and surprising humor: the whale blows water into the air, pffffssssst!, the raven tips its head just so, the sheep lies down to sleep with its legs straight out.
Both All and One
As the pageant draws on and each animal shares the story of their extinction, I am aware of another balancing act, another held contradiction: each character is at once generalized and utterly particular. The stories they share, too, manage to be at once collective and entirely individual, enormous and surprisingly small.
They represent all ravens, all whales, all sheep respectively—explicitly. But because Todd and her performers are doing so much specific character development, both in scenes and in movement, they also resist that generalization. They speak about farmland by way of a specific farm. About the practice of capturing whales by way of one capture. About many days by way of a single day.
The pageant host, too, even as she represents humankind, is finally only herself. Kathy! Pleased (for now) with the sheep’s sweetness and naïveté, enthralled by the gore and pain of the whale’s story, which includes being forced to perform in a waterpark show, and caught in a lie by the raven who, it turns out, has a relationship with her outside of the competition.
I am not prepared for how moving it is. They all go towards the monster. I don’t write anything in my notebook for a long time. They complete the run.
The End is Near
The raven and the whale are quickly passing through their duet again, far upstage, pushing off and pulling towards each other in a way that evokes the interconnectedness of species, of our fates. I hear their breath in the room, their feet on the floor. Their reflections do a blurred, upside-down version of everything. They take turns lifting each other, standing on and lying across each other’s shoulders. I write in my notebook, how are we held up but by each other?
I get that good theater feeling again, a sadness very much rooted in an awareness of time passing. The ephemerality of live performance, of bodies in space and time, of our time here together. The urgency of extinction. Time presses on all of it. Even the residency is nearly over! The sun is falling, the year telescoping towards its end.
Suddenly, pigeons fill the soaring windows of the studio. Every pane becomes a frame but none can hold them. Their silhouettes are uncountable against the city, warm and whirling up through the canyon of 10th avenue. All I can think is alive, alive, alive. Still alive.
Top photo by Maria Baranova.