Anna Kroll and Chloë Engel are improvisers, dancers, and listeners.

We swear we make dances, but they’re also phone calls, choose-your-own-adventure vignettes, living installations, games, and/or oracles for predicting our ecological destiny.

Image Description: Anna and Chloë stand together and look directly at the camera. Anna, a femme with brown feathered shoulder-length hair and green eyes, wears a black button up. Chloë, a freckled, white person with shoulder length red-hair and blue eyes wears an orange long sleeve shirt. Behind them is a white table with impercievable materials, and cream colored piece of muslin draped against the wall. In the foreground to pieces of the cream fabric create an asymetrical frame.

Photo by Tomi Faison

Our work challenges the viewer to participate in absurd logic.

In this theatrical world, props, set materials, and performing bodies take on an excess of meaning. The ground is sand, and then it is salt, and then the ashes of a loved one, and then memory. Everything is alive— breathing and morphing and coping with it’s own impermanence. Inside this roller coaster of pretend, something thrilling, unsettling, and deeply human is revealed.

Are you seeing what I see? Are we looking at the same thing? Like clouds shape shifting in the sky, or a Rube Goldberg machine, events are meandering yet connected. Like a dream, there’s a “reason” but it’s not what you were expecting. Artificial and natural materials coexist in an ecosystem that holds poetic implications.

We are dancers, so we think a lot about our bodies, the viewers’ body and the space as a body. We construct multi-sensory practices for remaining embodied and autonomous in an unraveling shared experience. Meticulously crafted processes informed by deep listening, consent and our jobs as teachers usher the audience into murky waters (even if we’re not there).

We ask the audience to sit with us in mystery. The shared unknown in our work is a reflection of the shared unknown we all live in together. We create work for an incomprehensible yet conceivable future. Our islands of imagination float within the real world.

︎thisspaceisabody

Our work has been presented as part of:

re:semblance at New Media Artspace (NYC/ online)
Spark IV: A New World? (Baltimore / online)
The Mind on Fire Variety Show (Baltimore/online).
Tendon Magazine

We have facilitated workshops independently and through Deep Play Institute and School of Making Thinking.

Anna Kroll

Anna Kroll is a dancer, educator and interdisciplinary artist. Anna Kroll’s performance work has been shown at No Theme Festival (Poughkeepsie, NY) in Philadelphia Theaters, Rivers and Subway Underpasses at FringeArts’ Scratch Night, Open Call Guerilla Outdoor Performance Festival, Invisible River’s Schuylkill River Arts Day, Cathy Weis' Sundays on Broadway (NYC), and Danspace's Draftwork series (NYC).

MFA from University of Maryland Baltimore County in Intermedia & Digital Art.

annakroll.com ︎︎︎

Chloë Engel

Chloë works with children, and makes performance about being a child. Chloë’s performance work has been shown at Lifeworld (Brooklyn, NY), AUNTS (Brooklyn, NY), Open Performance at Movement Research, No Theme Festival (Poughkeepsie, NY), Little Berlin (Philadelphia, PA), Middlebury College, and Bennington College.

chloeengel.org ︎︎︎