occupation, 2013 [4:26 min] 

explores the erosion of democracy - a state of uprootedness in the continuing context of the events of the Iraq War and the World Financial Crisis. 
The film features three movers: two dancers and one building. In 2009, the Odd Fellows Hall in SLC, a five million-pound building underwent an engineering feat when it was raised eleven feet off its foundation and moved in one piece. Interleaved footage of the dancers and the building in motion illustrates their correlation—a mounting tension that speaks to the democracy in the US being shaken, uprooted and redefined underneath people’s feet.

KAPITAL, 2016 [7:43 min]

asks what the actual capital of a democratic society is and if capitalism is the premise for democracy. These performative explorations and experiments for a social form in development were developed for the 2016 theater dance production “Salon de la Démocratie or Capital and … “ by tatraum projekte schmidt from Düsseldorf/Germany. 

UNDERNEATH, 2020 [28:08 min]

is the 3rd part of my Erosion of Democracy series ... while the first two ask how democracy is changed underneath people's feet and what the actual capital of a democratic society is ... this one digs deep and investigates what roles inherited stress and trauma, fear, anger, guilt, shame, as well as learned behavior play in the rise of extreme leadership. In ‘UNDERNEATH’ the performers grapple with holding two spaces, that of white privilege, and a reckoning with its history of cruelty - past and present. It is an attempt to find pathways to avoid repeating history and changing habitual patterns. The perspectives of the performers form the lens of this investigation: A German, bisexual woman descendent of parents who were children in the Second World War, and a queer man. The artists bring into focus the privilege white skin provides and the weight of its inheritance. They emphasize the transformative healing needed in order to overcome habitual patterns of Otherness and the perpetuation of power structures including violence ranging from self harm, racism to armed conflict.