“It reflects a new, more open way of looking at the world and at things in the world, our world… The new sensibility is defiantly pluralistic; it is dedicated both to an excruciating seriousness and to fun and wit and nostalgia.” – Susan Sontag

Research for All Times At Once arguably began years ago, with a work called Forgetting and Being Forgotten. This piece was concerned with both sides of a transition; what does it mean to simultaneously move on and have others leave you behind? How do we resolve our pasts, presents, and futures with the timelines of those around us? The two-sidedness of this approach, or the willingness to hold multiple ideas at once, resonated with me, and I returned to this idea October 2021 as the spark for a new work. Conceptually, this piece began with the idea of memory – how do our experiences of memory affect our lived, present selves? How do memories of sensations, relationships, stories, and more affect our physical, daily existence? All avenues of research were valid, so long as they reflected this core. Throughout this process, we held true that we could inhabit multiple ideas at once – multiple times at once.

In being honest to the “defiantly pluralistic” core of this work, we produced a wholly human piece of dance that spans a wide range of moods, tones, and styles. Memory is not singularly somber or nostalgic – memory is joy, grief, pain, discomfort, hilarity, longing, hope, attachment, embarrassment, gratitude and much more. And our experience of these memories – they’re even more wide-ranging. This dance acknowledges the full spectrum of our being, and allows our past, present, and future memories to coalesce into one beautifully chaotic experience of the self.

We invite you to enter the space of this dance as your full self. Engage, respond, reflect, remember – allow yourself to ride the waves of memory as they happen. As always, there are no right or wrong responses. With that being said, we invite you to settle into the space, open your awareness, and enjoy the journey with us.

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Emily Haussler