Katherine Longstreth as “Dr. Kate Long” performing “LET’S DANCE”

Solo performance created during Alembic Artists Residency, Premiered March 2024, Performance Works NW, Portland OR.

Equal parts academic lecture, conversation, and somatic investigation, Let’s Dance explores the role of dance in our culture, authenticity in the creative process, the neurochemistry of embodiment and what it means to know something in your bones. Using video, text and movement, Katherine Longstreth, along with collaborators Marilys Ernst and Jen Mitas, wonders what a future fully entangled with AI might mean for the physical self. 

”Long delivered a lecture in dialogue with a “robot” collaborator, ITA (voiced by Jen Mitas), which stood on a pedestal nearby. With ITA’s “help,” Long delivered a lecture called “Your Brain on Dance,” sharing different clips of dance videos on the TV screen. As her lecture progressed, Long found herself in a verbal kerfuffle with ITA, who seemed to have slipped around its “regulations. ITA began asking Long intrusive questions about what it means to be embodied.”   

Hannah Krafcik, April 14, 2024, Oregon Arts Watch Review