Making & Moving

Scroll down for portfolio—a glimpse into previous doings and collaborations.

Podcast: By the Seed of Our Plants – I have been interviewed on this podcast and more recently help record episodes/interview guests

Click here to hear a newfound love (harp improvisations).

Click here for examples of workshops-as-art

Check the events page for any upcoming stuff

Related Articles/Blog Posts I’ve Written: Sorrow and Jest at the Second Annual Feast of Fools ; Thoughts on Eco-poetics and Prepositions, Ecosomatics and Singing, Hand::Heart::Land::Art

Recommended Book/Essay Resources: Moving Consciously by Sondra Fraleigh; Kazuo Ohno’s World: From Without and Within, by Kazuo Ohno and Yoshito Ohno; This Very Moment by Barbara Dilley; Strange Tools by Alva Noe; Moment Work by Moises Kaufman and Barbara Pitts McAdams; Body and Earth by Andrea Olsen; The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron; The Elements of Style by Suzan-Lori Parks; The Theatre of Grotowski by Jennifer Kumiega; One Endless Dance: Tanaka Min’s Experimental Practice

“…to put it another way//I would give all metaphors//in return for one word//drawn out of my breast like a rib//for one word//contained within the boundaries//of my skin//but apparently this is not possible//and just to say—I love//I run around like mad//picking up handfuls of birds//and my tenderness//which after all is not made of water// asks the water for a face..” (Zbignew Herbert)

  • Staunton Mall/Liminal Lot

    Staunton Mall/Liminal Lot

    Throughout 2023, a group of interdisciplinary artists & land stewards gathered at the construction/deconstruction zone of "Staunton Mall," which after 50 years of materially ordered existence has been mostly demolished...to perhaps be replaced by...another mall? We gathered a little bit of video and photographic evidence of our experiences and art-making there. We presented a short video of work-in-progress sound/dance experiments and field notes at the "Uncertainty Potluck" show at Queen City Brewing - those gatherings were catalyzed by local artist Rachel Austin. //The 6 minute video is available upon request.// Topics of interest: Disturbance as portal; successional tension of a landscape; Relationship with place; Simultaneity of nostalgia and the grotesque; Disposability - - - - - decomposability; artifice/reality; Spiritual digestion; Resilience and first-responder plants. ///// ///// Throughout 2024 we have been and will continue to meet at a series of identified local liminal areas, whether due to de(construction) and real estate companies, altered ecological trajectory, storm damage, abandonment/haunting, potential refugia, or other undefinable places of transition that otherwise go unnoticed or uncared-for in mainstream awareness.
  • On Felt and Feral Grounds

    On Felt and Feral Grounds

    Catalyzed by Taylor Hanigosky's felted fiber and sculpture work, a group of artists/dancers/musicians collaborated to create a performance for the opening night of the gallery installation of "On Felt and Feral Grounds" in Waynesboro, VA at the Shenandoah Valley Art Center. April 2023. A video recording of this event exists for those interested. Contributors: Taylor Hanigosky, Jordan Fust, Victoria Maria Moyer, Shauna Frantz, Jenna, and Anne Hopestill Kappers "The process of wet felting wool is a modality for feeling across layered time scales of impact. The movement relationships between the body and wool embody geologic empathy where wool can act as a proxy for earthmoving processes. The body, respectively, comes into confrontation with its capacity to affect change. The action of felting works in collaboration with the intrinsic desire or function of wool: to felt. The body is pulled into a ritual where it is both the catalyst of change, and also the servant of the wool’s inherant trajectory. The Chaos of disordered fibers becomes compressed into a material of durable softness, owing its strength to the sureness of The Tangle. There is an object at the end of this elemental process—one whose utility has meant survival for humans for millennia. And there is also a relic of the forces that shape it, of the community that comes together to ruminate, to turn fodder into protein, to bend, to combust, to tangle. The felt is marked." -Taylor Hanigosky
  • Hepatica's Song

    Hepatica's Song

    April 2022. An artifact of connecting through voice. Hepatica's Song. I started by wanting to sing FOR Hepatica, but by the end there was some sense of being "sung through," too. I was making a flower essence and connecting with apparent themes such as wayfinding, timing, and knowing when to open and when to close. Overlaps between old and new. Joy in transition. I have many unfinished voice notes on my device, little artifacts of being mused and musing. Hooks and repeating melodies that float in and out, sometimes as a result of intentional practice, sometimes as a result of dreams or place-connection or just suddenly needing to sing while cleaning. This is still a fairly new practice for me to cultivate song creation, especially curious about it in regards to gift-giving.
  • Woodlands Cemetery 4/3/20

    Shannon Brooks and I did this distance graveyard duet experiment. Among other things, it was a way to respond to our needs, wants, and intuitions during the time of lockdown/physical distancing. We each taped a go pro camera to a part of our body and simply improvised/walked/danced in the cemetery, far apart from each other, but sometimes also catching glimpses of each other.
  • Dancing on the Edge at Flowers Gallery

    Dancing on the Edge at Flowers Gallery

    Butoh kinesthetic response led by Maureen Momo Freehill in collaboration with other dancers at closing of Aleah Chapin's painting exhibit, "What Happens at the Edge," while keyboardist Hans Young-Binter created an improvised soundscape.

    Location: Flowers Gallery; Artist: Aleah Chapin; Title of event: Dancing on the Edge; Director: Maureen Momo Freehill; Genre: Butoh Landscape; Photographer: Max Hart, beingmax.com

    Performed in collaboration with BUTOH NEXT International Conference hosted in NYC in November 2019. I have also included a visual movement score I created in Momo's workshop that same weekend.

  • Dance-Clown duets at Old City Festival

    Dance-Clown duets at Old City Festival

    Curated by Impermanent Society of Philadelphia, performance space in front of Sugarcube. I collaborated with Jeff Giarrusso as we improvised in the worlds of butoh-inspired dance and clowning. October 2018 and 2019.

  • RISE: Relationship is Self Existing

    RISE: Relationship is Self Existing

    A site-specific, community-engaged score for citizens to explore stillness and movement in LOVE Park, Philadelphia; as a means to sensing connectedness. Project created by Asimina Chremos and Leah Stein Dance Company and presented by the Philadelphia Fringe 9/14/19. I participated as a performer. Photo by Kat Sullivan
  • Plenum Chamber

    Plenum Chamber

    Created by Jeff Giarrusso and Victoria Maria, Performed by Jeff & Victoria, Additional Puppeteering & Tech by Alexis Howland

    Performed June 22 & 23, 2019 at Panorama Space Philly

    "Everyone gathered under daydream fossils, gone sad, ruined from earth to leaf to seed to breathe. A freakazoid multiplies distortions of sovereign sanity! Truth haunts when they come sprouting out of a can of worms worth salad-scraping teeth, into oblivion.

    Plenum Chamber has been heralded by The New York Slimesas “...uh…” and “a swampy quantum puddle to remember.” The New England Esquire says: “I want to go beyond my wildest. Someday we might understand each other.” Critics agree: there will be puppets, clowning, and butoh-inspired dream dances."

    _ _ _ _ _

    We began by researching our family trees and ended up in a surreal world of loss and magic.

  • Kocham Cie

    Kocham Cie

    Cobody improvisational/semi-structured dance with Victoria Moyer, Jeff Giarrusso, and Volodymyr Titarenko @ Subbody School in Dharamsala, India, January 2019

    dedicated to Anna Gonciarz, my maternal Grandmother

  • Game Over

    Game Over

    Victoria participated in the 2018 Women's Weekend Film Challenge as a screenwriter. The team created a horror-inspired short film titled “Game Over” which screened on Sept. 29, 2018 at Anthology Films Archive in NYC.

    _ _ _ __

    Game over was selected to screen in the The Big Bloody Apple: Women in Horror Month Event, which occurred on Feb. 21 at Stone Creek Bar and Lounge.
  • Mother Morphosis No Psychosis

    Mother Morphosis No Psychosis

    This is a piece that takes the form of a novella-length genre-bending storypoem. Written across 2017/2018.

    A conglomeration of “traditionally” accessible dialogue that eventually disintegrates into stage directions, journalistic fragments, and incantations of the goddess-realm, Mother Morphosis No Psychosis serves as a portal into a peculiar world obsessed with deconstructing the westernized diagnosis of “psychosis.” Tropes of psychiatric institutionalization are problematized when set amidst the barest, naked, vulnerable guts of pain and desire. Besides, you know as well as I do that reality, like a prism, dazzles and deludes us in many directions. In order to find our silent protagonist Almitra, we listen to the voices of the bifurcated feminized and masculinized religious mythologies and wade through swamps of embodied trauma to understand how and why her “psychosis” was an inevitable gift of dissolution and discovery.

  • Eraserhead2.0

    Eraserhead2.0

    Created by Katharina Schmidt and Victoria Moyer; Live Performance by Katharina Schmidt; Video and Directing by Victoria Moyer; Inspiration and Interjection by Benjamin Bennett and the World Wide Web. June 2018, performed at Philly Improv Theater as part of SoLow Fest.

    Kasparhauser2.0, a nobody raised by Père Youtube, wants to be someone like somebody else was once. Please help Kasparhauser2.0 by subscribing to this page and leaving a comment about your favorite part or leaving a comment. #wittgenstein #handke #emojiculture #digitalmediation#sometatheatrical #workout #likeforlike #realcarrotfacts #whatacreep#bodysintrouble #iloveyourvideos #dontyouhavebetterthingstodo#sittingandsmiling #sittingandwalking #textingandtrying #failingandemailing#dudeareyouOKtho? #2millionviews#inheritsscrapsofinformationchanneledoutdailybythemediaorbanaleverydaydiscourseandreproducesthemashisownrealitywhichisnothingelsethanareproductionofareproductionadinfinitum #hahahaha

  • All Birds are Phoenixes

    All Birds are Phoenixes

    Butoh dance video collaboration with Chris Carlone. Dedicated to chicks fallen and separated from their mothers.
  • 100th Monkey Theatre Ensemble

    100th Monkey Theatre Ensemble

    Devised Theater ensemble using Moment Work to generate socially relevant material. Recent work: 52:15, based on a true story.
  • The Conference of the Birds

    The Conference of the Birds

    A devised musical based on the ancient Persian poem of the same name. Created in collaboration with students and faculty at Kings Academy in Madaba, Jordan.

    "COME YOU LOST ATOMS TO YOUR CENTRE DRAW, AND BE THE ETERNAL MIRROR THAT YOU SAW."

  • The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer

    The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer

    This is a production I directed in 2013 at Bucknell University, with the collaboration of many student and faculty designers, technicians, stage managers, performers, and choreographers. Play is written by Carson Kreitzer.
  • Aria da Capo

    Aria da Capo

    A show I directed in 2011 at Bucknell University. Written by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Click here for an excerpt from my 2017 unpublished play manuscript, Metta Physics; or The Great Flash. This play is the result of a collision between romance, quantum physics, and trauma.

Click here to read the 2014 manuscript for Tantalus, which was produced at the Manhattan Repertory Theater. This uncanny take on the greek myth was originally envisioned as part of a horror-themed halloween festival.