Seed Bombs
Seed Bombs was a four-month collective movement research process directed by Daria Faïn, developed through sustained studio practice and group inquiry. Within this environment, Daria’s Feeding the Demon practice intersected with my own active imagination and ongoing improvisational research, allowing distinct embodied figures to emerge over time.
One of these figures was a king with broken legs. Head-driven and relentless, he keeps moving forward despite the collapse of his body, dragging himself through space in pursuit of a distant castle, unaware that the castle is his own damaged, neglected body. In response, a second figure appeared: a female clairvoyant who speaks truth back to the king. Drawing on lines from my writing — “I’ve seen your bridges falling down, your sacred mirrors turned around” — she names what he refuses to see and carries the emotional cost of his denial.
Together, these figures form a moving dialogue between will and vulnerability, action and witnessing. Through this collective process, my individual work emerged in the form of mythic imagery and embodied states that explore how power, injury, and truth live inside the human body.
June 16, 2025 at Judson Memorial Church.
Photography by Rachel Keane
Cuentos Cortos de mi Otra Madre
Dance theater piece written and performed by Emily Aiken and Agata Surma
This work is an embodied exploration of how gendered and androgynous forces move through the psyche and the body. It was developed through a shared laboratory process of guided improvisation, where two female performers worked with archetypal imagery, emotional states, voice, and physical action. From this process, seven related movement-and-text scores emerged. These scores were then shaped, learned, and repeated, allowing material that began as intuitive and improvised to become a clear, performable structure. Informed by somatic practice and experimental performance lineages such as Grotowski and Pina Bausch, the work treats the stage as a site for lived experience and embodied inquiry rather than character-based representation.
Teatro La Quadra 2013 Panama City, Panama
Photography by Teatro La Quadra
Manias
In Manias, my charachter enters the stage styled as a classic pin-up: red lips, polished hair and a fitted dress that evokes mid-century femininity. She moves with poise and allure, embodying the image of idealized beauty. At first, her gestures seduce and play to the gaze: smiling, posing, twirling. But then, abruptly, her body convulses. Her smile vanishes. A seizure-like tremor overtakes her. Its’s violent, raw, uncontrollable. Her limbs tense, her torso shudders, her face distorts with rage and pain.
These ruptures happen over and over again.
She returns to the performance of femininity (soft, composed, smiling) only to be ripped from it again by the surging physical eruptions of something deeper, darker, and far more real. The audience watches as the woman on stage cycles through beauty and breakdown, seduction and seizure, silence and scream—trapped in the madness of enacting a femininity that was never hers, while the shadow of anger flashes like a flare from the depths of her true self.
Photography by J Lu Velez
Dancing Body / Cancer Body / My Body
The body is where meaning is not thought, but felt. My six months of chemotherapy were a slow descent into pain, into what was unwanted, undesired, and unavoidable. As my body narrowed into survival, dance became my deepest pleasure. Moving was the one place where I was no longer a medical object, but a living, sensing being again, where life could be felt moving through me.
That experience deeply shaped how I work. I am not interested in movement as decoration or technique, but as a way of listening to what lives beneath linear thought. Through improvisation and deep listening, I let the body speak, and I follow what arises, whether emotions, images, or truths that cannot be reached through words alone. Drawing on Anaïs Nin’s idea that art must be born in the “womb-cells of the mind,” my work moves from what I think of as the womb-cells of the body, where sensation, imagination, and memory exist before language and abstraction.
March 2024, Forest near Opole, Poland
