Six Quiet Dogs (2025)
Six Quiet Dogs is the result of a two-year assignment Levine gave herself to pay attention to her world through sound—sirens and pauses in conversation, clanging radiators and stalled cars, a tennis ball on a metal slide, police batons on bodies, artillery shells on apartment buildings. The resulting work is a night of dancing, synth-infused song, and intimate entanglements with unspectacular household items that happen to make spectacular sounds.
Six Quiet Dogs premiers at Target Margin Theater in Sunset Park, Brooklyn in Fall 2025. Choreographed, written, and directed by Abigail Levine with longtime collaborators composer Paula Matthusen and dancers Martita Abril, Anna Azrieli, Julian Barnett, and Kristopher K.Q. Pourzal, joined for this production by designer Karen Boyer and producer Amanda Hameline. This new work is a companion piece to Redactions (Chocolate Factory Theater, 2022) and continues my long-standing preoccupation with the push and pull between bodies and language. The performance will be accompanied by a zine, Words Begin as Sound, which will include texts written during the work’s development.
Video stills by Esy Casey. First draft showing at Fridman Gallery, fall 2023.