Concept and Choreography: Kat Brown

Performers: Kat Brown, Emily-Rose Cannon, Mimi Doan, Cole Stapleton

Performed May 23, 2024 at Center for Performance Research in NYC

1,000 Ways to Fall Apart is a performance for four dancers that centers on intimacy, collapse, and shared weight as temporal and relational practices. The work begins with four performers holding one another in an extended embrace, repeatedly hugging and then falling together. These falls are not spectacular or abrupt; they are negotiated, collective events that require listening, trust, and constant adjustment. Falling becomes a shared language—an agreement to give weight, to lose balance, and to be held in the process. Over the course of the work, the configuration gradually distills. The group of four transitions into couples, and eventually into a single performer falling alone. This structural reduction traces how intimacy shifts when support changes.

Rooted in my broader research into trauma and temporality, the piece treats falling as both a physical and psychological state. The repeated action allows the performers to enter a slowed, attuned temporal field where trusting the body and trusting one another becomes a radical act. Intimacy here is not performative or romanticized; it is practical, negotiated, and fragile. The work holds space for tenderness and failure to coexist, revealing how falling apart can also be a way of staying connected to sensation, presence, and time.