Indigo Dance Company / Leah Zeiger - Closer To... HYSTERIA

Opening with the debut of Indigo Dance Company, "Closer To..." challenges our notions of escapism as a form of running from, and considers the very human impulse to search for a way to bring us closer to our life source. Then, dive into the world of "HYSTERIA", Leah Zeiger's newest work exposing the maddening, crazy-making experience of being in an abusive relationship, and being forced to re-experience that dynamic in the context of daily life as a woman living in a patriarchal society.

"Closer To...", directed by Dani Burd, marks the debut of Burd’s Indigo Dance Company. The multimedia performance, choreographed by Burd in collaboration with her company members, will follow individual movers’ as they traverse their experiences, battles, breakdowns with, and ultimate surrender to, escapism. Regardless of our chosen form of escapism, our society views these attempts as feeble endeavors to run farther from life. But escapism is simply a byproduct of being human, something universally experienced and hardly shameful. It is in the loneliness surrounding escapism that our sadness, rage, fears, and nightmares come to life. Connection is the antidote. Our quest is not to be farther from, but rather, closer to our life source: our Universe, our soul, our Earth, our connection to one another.

"HYSTERIA" will explore both women's relationship to anger and the fear that much of the world (women included) hold towards women’s bodies. Largely informed by Zeiger's experiences from an abusive relationship, "HYSTERIA" looks squarely at the way women are so often disenfranchised and stripped of their agency and autonomy both in personal relationships and in the world at large. A woman’s body has become (or, perhaps, always has been) politicized, commodified, and vilified — a phenomenon which causes such a rift between our relationships to each other and to our own bodies that we are left with no choice but fear or be feared, express or be engulfed by our righteous rage. Set to Adam Schwartz and Max Berlin's powerful score, "HYSTERIA" will challenge what you believe about how your body craves an expression of rage.

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Dani Burd is a multifaceted movement artist, director, choreographer, producer, educator from Los Angeles, CA. Dani has been practicing contemporary, post modern, experimental, meditative, and improvisational dance forms for the past 20 years and is the founder and director of Indigo Dance Company. Her inspirations are evoked from her lived experiences, journeys of healing, challenges and triumphs, and her vision to allow others to share the same. Dani holds a BFA degree in dance from Cal State Long Beach University. She teaches contemporary, post modern, and exploratory movement forms across the states at various studios, intensives, and music/wellness festivals. Dani has had a colorful career in creating live performances, multimedia visuals, music videos/visual albums, and dance films. Her additional ten years in the music industry have given her a vibrant community of artists to collaborate and build with consistently. Some of her credits include Robot Koch, Six Missing, Insomniac Events, and Tristian Eckerson. Last year she was commissioned by the Mojave, CA based Art in Residency Gallery to create a dance film on their 2023 art installation in the desert titled HOME. HOME went on to be featured in multiple art/dance film festivals and she self-produced a sold-out screening which also featured 8 other artist's work in the community called HOME: in LA. Dani is passionate about creating spaces for other artists to flourish and show work in and intends to continue creating these spaces through the channel of Indigo for many years to come.

Leah Zeiger is a choreographer, dancer, and activist based in Los Angeles. As a survivor of a teenage abusive relationship, Leah's work is largely derived from her lived experience as well as embodied research in the survivor community. Leah is the founder of The Sunflower Project- a nonprofit organization that educates young people on sexual violence and relationship abuse and empowers survivors to tell their story through artmaking. Leah’s methodology - Body Memory - invokes somatic principles, improvisational scores, and body-based research to explore the ways in which our bodies hold memory and how those memories shape our life experience. She has been commissioned to choreograph and present her work by entities such as the National Domestic Violence Hotline, the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Los Angeles Contemporary Dance Company Choreographer’s Lab, and more. She will be presenting work in the summer of 2024 at Highways Performance Space and the Odyssey Summer Dance Festival.