The works I choreograph for my dance company, Carrie Ahern Dance, bring both performers and audience into an intimate communal space where being vulnerable and uncomfortable can spark both possibility and new perspectives.
This is why supporting "If You Knew Me" feels like a natural extension of what I have spent my life devoted to.
My current multi-year project, "Sex Status", focusing on women in their quotidian and sexual lives and how they overlap, is performed for the public in a series of private homes and was featured by The New York Times.
Part I (performed in 2018 &2019) was a jumping off from Simone de Beauvoir's feminist masterpiece "The Second Sex"; Part II (2022 &2023) looked at how women use and receive language during the act of sex; Part III (in development) investigates how religion affects women in their sexual lives.
I spent 2014-2017 developing performance work around currency, value, and alternative economies with choreographer Andrea Haenggi as well as writer/journalist Rob Neuwirth for "1067 PacificPeople", a DIY art space in a former mechanic's garage in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. A couple featured performances were "The Pop-up Gesture Store", a store where experiences not objects were sold and "Pickpocket Dance Party" with a DJ and a pickpocketing tutorial.
For my multi-year project about modern death (2011-2016), I learned to hunt, butcher, and slaughter animals to learn more about the animals we consume and worked as a hospice volunteer. This research evolved into "Borrowed Prey", a series of public projects ranging from site-specific performances in a butcher shop to a workshop-structured experience, "The Art of Burial", that invites participants to explore their individual fantasy burial scenarios.