Choreography & Dance
My choreography explores relationships - between people, and with objects, self, and audience. Somatic practice, poetics, improvisation, and intuition are my sources of creative inquiry. What does it mean to listen with and move from the body? This compassionate questioning of habitual ways of knowing, relating and being emerges from my changing relationship with CPTSD.
Raised in the Midwest and having recently lived on both coasts, I have performed across the US. In San Francisco, I danced for Alma Esperanza Cunningham, performing her work at Safehouse Arts, Dance Mission Theater, and iMPACt Center for Arts & Dance. My work has been presented at Safehouse Arts (SF), Bryant Lake Bowl (MN), Red Eye Theater (MN), the Cowles Center for Performing Arts (MN), Krannert Center for the Performing Arts (IL), and Danceworks Milwaukee (WI).
Shotgun Baby Drunk Animal Jukebox
SAFEhouse Arts, San Francisco, CA
West Wave Festival 31
January 17th, 2025
Performance & Choreography:
Chloe Nagle Cetinkaya
Shotgun Baby Drunk Animal Jukebox is an in-progress solo reflecting upon experiences of violence and contradiction while coming of age with an emerging female identity in rural America. The work also explores refusal and the desire for self-definition and embodied autonomy.
Was It Good for You?
SAFEhouse Arts, San Francisco, CA
April 18th & 19th, 2025
Performance & Choreography:
Kym McDaniel & Chloe Nagle Cetinkaya
This improvisation score emerges from the question, what is the fastest way to end something? When is an ending a relief? Is an ending an orgasm? What if you can’t get it up? What if you can’t get up off the floor? When is participating a refusal or a resistance…and when will this be over?
An evening of Bay Area performance and interdisciplinary collaboration curated by Chloe Nagle Cetinkaya, ENDINGS emerges as a contemplation of change, loss and possibility. A show-and-tell of works in progress and new premieres, we nod to our mentors, look towards new moves, and embrace being in the midst of something yet unformed.
Photography by Sean Anomie
PARTS/GREAT AMERICA (Excerpt)
Dance Mission Theater, CA
March 4th & 5th, 2024
Premiered at San Francisco International Arts Festival
Choreography: Alma Esperanza Cunningham
Dancers: Raina Sacksteder & Chloe Nagle Cetinkaya
Great America is the beginning of something, an abstract work-in-progress that pulls from Cunninham’s early childhood memories of growing up in the late seventies and eighties. She was inspired by a KQED interview with poet J. Michael Martinez, who wrote Tarta Americana, a book of love letters/poems addressed to Ritchie Valens. This work explores memories, ideas of culture, and what defines our cultural identity.
Script Score
Red Eye Theater, Minneapolis, MN
October 14th, 2022
Performance & Choreography:
Kym McDaniel & Chloe Nagle Cetinkaya
Video Projection & Text:
Kym McDaniel
Script Scores is an immersive, multimedia collaborative work investigating boundary setting and the body’s relationship with trauma. By creating dance and video improvisation structures with elements of unpredictability, the artists seek to translate how pain shapes interaction with ourselves, other people, and the environment.
Photography by Erik Gundersen
If/Then, You/I
Red Eye Theater, Minneapolis, MN
October 7th, 2022
Performance & Choreography:
Chloe Nagle Cetinkaya
If/Then, You/I is an improvisation score exploring call and response. The work explores individual and collective choice-making through audience participation.
Gesticulating Ingested Suggestions
University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point Spectral Microcinema
April 21st, 2021
The Language of Gesture
Curated by Kym McDaniel
Performance & Choreography:
Chloe Nagle Cetinkaya
Gesticulating Ingested Suggestionsis an improvisation score exploring biological, kinesthetic, and relational rhythms. Rhythms are established for gestures to emerge and transform.
Horse Witness
Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, IL
March 1st, 2nd & 3rd, 2018
Studio Dance I
Program A
Improvisation Score:
Chloe Nagle Cetinkaya
Performance:
Charli Brissey & Chloe Nagle Cetinkaya
Masters of Fine Arts thesis concert performance. The performers follow their intuition and respond to one another, flowing between following and inhibiting their own movement impulses while “shadowing” each other. The performance served as a laboratory for relating with skittishness, avoidance, vulnerability and self-doubt. My thesis explored questions around the making of self and how our relationships inform who we are and how we move through the world.