Artist Statement
My Artistic Manifesto: subvert, disrupt, question, cut & paste, reframe, saturate, flood, callback, repeat. Apply to research, choreography, performance, and teaching with appropriate, respectful context; know when to wield and when to yield; make malleable as a means of empathetic and curious care and excavation. My creative process is a fringe, so large, banging, social, buoyant, revivalist, communal, personal, anatomical, skeletal, sinuous, space-eating, fun-loving, tender, tense, dreamhard, workharder, manifestation of a dance lab/test kitchen for mixing highbrow/lowbrow cocktails of construction paper, unusual bitters, and Tikkun Olam. But that's just me. My work is about tethers to you. I want to fold you in like a could-be-delicious batter. I want to invite you to grapple with choreographic content, alongside the cast and dance. And I want us to continue teasing out meaning from the movement far beyond the site-specific view and theatrical timeframe. You and tethers, this work...ours. It crosses borders between studio-lab, classroom, proscenium, site-specific view, and our pillows. Research interviews, a middle-age solo, and a 40-person community work define my current state of art mind. Right now: two babes on my hips, mothering as an act of resistance, a conversation through movement: bustling, razor-sharp, consequential, between us.
Sarah Beth Oppenheim, Choreographer Restoration Restoration Hard Tear, an implication Dance Film 2020