Tunnel Walk, created and performed as a collaborative duet between choreographer Alaina Wilson and designer Oriana Catton, was motivated by personal experiences of being seen in today’s society and associated feelings of instability. Themes thought, felt, and explored throughout the making process included anxiety, isolation, dislocation, touch and bodily contact, giving and receiving attention, and female identity.

The two artists take on distinct performative identities within the work, reflective of their individual selves and past states of being. Their characters, when set in motion simultaneously, develop a complex and ever-shifting dynamic that lies at the heart of the choreography. The two figures work through states of unease, antagonism, competition, and ambivalence, countered by moments of understanding, support, solidarity, as a means of representing and dealing with personal narrative. The movement material emphasizes the hyper-mobility of the dancers while playing with the performers’ gaze in an attempt to evoke subtleties of internal versus external expression.

Catton’s minimal set design: a flat, black triangular structure of the approximate height of the performers that projects a thin, descending diagonal line through the space that eventually meets the floor in the downstage corner, both divides and anchors the performance space. Without dictating the movements of the performers, the sculpture works to visually articulate the trajectory of the dance—heightening both the performers’ and the viewers’ awareness of spatial explorations and relationships that fluctuate throughout the dance.

When performed Tunnel Walk seems to exist outside of time, unfolding on an inevitable trajectory as the performers repeatedly collide, oppose one another, and reconnect (though not always in that order!).

Performance History

Dixon Place | New York, NY | November 2018

Eden’s Expressway | New York, NY | November 2018