Choreography & Dance
What does it mean to listen with and move from the body? To sense, feel, and lean into the moment? How can movement tune us into what we desire, while revealing what we need? How can the ways that we move through the world transform and what does it mean to allow that process to change us? I’m interested in intersections between creative writing and dance, moved by how they can be tools for revision, a process of envisioning new possibilities in which we are free to be more fully ourselves. Compassionately questioning habitual ways of relating with the body while dancing together emerges from my changing relationship with CPTSD.
Raised in the Midwest and having recently lived on both coasts, I’ve 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).
Was It Good for You?
SAFEhouse Arts, San Francisco, CA
April 18th & 19th, 2025
ENDINGS
Curated by Chloë Nagle Çetinkaya
Performance & Choreography:
Kym McDaniel & Chloë Nagle Çetinkaya
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, 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
Shotgun Baby Drunk Animal Jukebox
SAFEhouse Arts, San Francisco, CA
West Wave Festival 31
January 17th, 2025
Performance & Choreography:
Chloë Nagle Çetinkaya
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.
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 & Chloë Nagle Çetinkaya
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 & Chloë Nagle Çetinkaya
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:
Chloë Nagle Çetinkaya
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:
Chloë Nagle Çetinkaya
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:
Chloë Nagle Çetinkaya
Performance:
Charli Brissey & Chloë Nagle Çetinkaya
Masters of Fine Arts thesis concert performance. The performers follow their intuition and respond to one another, shifting 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 how our relationships inform who we are and how we move through the world.
Chicken Bark
Company Brewing, Milwaukee WI
July 14th, 2017
5X5: Summer Series 2017
Curated by Kym McDaniel
Performance & Improvisation Score:
Chloë Nagle Çetinkaya
Through a process of moving between improvisation and freewriting, this poem-score emerged. Chicken Bark is a practice of revision; revising the writing through dance and revising the dance through writing. This score deals with performance anxiety and the wish to find refuge in the space and audience.
Score:
Welcoming the audience, listening to the space, hand over heart, sending compassion to myself
Imploding, teeth hugging my tongue
Circularity of joints as gentle waves melt sinews from rope to flowing warm honey
Skin sprouting like fronds
Small vibration in my solar plexus diffusing
I want to breathe fire
I want to be a horse without halting
Extract the wings, replace eyeballs with feathers
Non sequitur bird calls, echolocating chicken barks (chicken prayers)
Closure – Sending compassion to myself and the audience, making eye contact