Catharine Dill / Exploding Moment

ARTIST IN RESIDENCE: THEATER

I am a Brooklyn-based director and producer working with a team of composers, video and sound designers, writers, performers and choreographers called Exploding Moment. Together we’ve created Date:Time at The Collective Unconscious, What I Like About Breasts at The Williamsburg Art and Historical (WAH) Center, and Can I Help You? at The Bushwick Starr. Our current project Ye’re Here, Cuzin! will premier at Incubator Arts Project in September 2011. I’ve co-produced and/or co-directed five projects with the arts ensemble Red Dive, which I co-founded. I’ve been awarded a Bessie Award for Installation and New Media, an AREA Award (awarded by Chashama and the National Endowment for the Arts), residencies at Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony and Artward Bound, and grants from Art Matters, the Greenwall Foundation, the Heathcote Foundation, the Curtis W. McGraw Foundation, and a Foundry Theatre Emerging Artists’ Award.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Our new project, Hot Dust, examines the intersection of spiritualism, performance and sexual ecstasy. The project centers around the character of a female spiritual medium working in the 19th century prairie states whose manifestation of ectoplasm (a substance or spiritual energy “exteriorized” by physical mediums) offers her clients such an otherworldly transformative artistic experience that they may overlook the fact she’s a charlatan.
Hot Dust cross-pollinates the force of experiential religion with remnants of 19th century expansionism and showmanship such as spirit photography techniques, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series and Aimee Semple McPherson’s Foursquare Church.