Pillow Lab:
Deborah Goffe

Pillow Lab:
Deborah Goffe

Residency: January 12 – 22  and May 6 – 7, 2022

Deborah Goffe is a dance maker, performer, educator, and curator whose commitments to locality, scalable intimacy, interdisciplinary, and the handmade compels her to cultivate environments and experiences through choreographic, design, and social processes. Through Scapegoat Garden (a Connecticut-based creative engine) and other platforms, Goffe strives to forge relationships between artists and communities by helping people see, create and contribute to more expansive visions of ourselves, each other, and the places we call home.

Goffe will be developing Liturgy|Order|Bridge in the Pillow Lab, a work inspired by communal embodiment in the Black church and the absurdity of Fellini’s ecclesiastical fashion show. These serve as points of reference to correlate religious ritual with theatrical devices that can make the membrane between performance and audience more porous. Centering dance as the organizing principle in a ritualized public ceremony, the work asks: What might it mean to engage dance practice as faith practice, performance as communal ceremony, performance space as consecrated site, and the fellowship of shared witness, place, and inheritance?

Liturgy|Order|Bridge activates our intersecting identities, senses of place, and commitments to support one another. Goffe will be joined in this endeavor by her core collaborators Lauren Horn, Arien Wilkerson (dance artists), and Abena Koomson-Davis (musician).