WHERE
EXPRESSION
MEETS DATA
Sikora + Dance was founded as a platform for continued creative growth and development for Artistic Director Caitlin Sikora and her collaborators. Its mission is to create aesthetically accessible, yet challenging dance works for the audience and artists to enjoy from conception to the final performance. The collaborative nature of the rehearsal process combines with complex, emotional subject matter and virtuosic movement, building a community of dancers and audience members exploring and discovering unnoticed intricacies of the human body and psyche.
Sikora + Dance is a community of artists expanding our own limits and the limits of our form. In the studio, we challenge ourselves to seek unfamiliar positions, connections, and feelings. We attend to the sensations that arise during our motion, collecting physical and emotional data that informs the development of our choreography in both form and theme. We hold conflicting truths. We find nuance in duality and celebrate complexity. We push each other, pull each other, lift each other, lower each other, continually inventing new moving architectures with our interlocking anatomical structures. We repeat. We rotate. We shift our vantage point. We repeat and repeat again, making space for all of the juice held within a single idea to emerge, to be seen and tasted.
Americans in Havana
Americans in Havana is inspired by a trip Caitlin took to Cuba with her husband Andy. It was Andy's first trip back to Cuba after immigrating to the United States 30 years earlier as a teenager, and he had been anxious but interested to visit his birthplace once again. The work is a love letter to Andy and his family, celebrating the beauty, excitement, and resilience evident in traditional Cuban songs. It follows the arc of the trip from classic cars to the world's most beautiful beach to the stunning architecture of Old Havana, eventually taking a sharp turn that an American could never have predicted.
Sharp Woman
Sharp Woman is an exploration of how women negotiate gender-based expectations and limitations and how their tactics have evolved over the past few generations. An all-female trio navigates angular positions with precision and attack, at times playing with provocatively feminine imagery, all searching for a sustainable sense of empowerment through self-acceptance. They seem to find some of the changes they are seeking, only to be faced with the same old questions once again.
Neopolitan Songs
A simple love duet set to music by Roberto Murolo, Neapolitan Songs explores the romance, confines, challenges, and acceptance of a lasting partnership. The dancers listfully glide, swoop, and spiral in unison, exploring ways to fit their bodies together. Tension grows as they begin to exert influence and develop balanced but asymmetrical roles, and though the tension and asymmetry are not resolved, the dancers eventually find acceptance in their imperfect partnership.
About Caitlin
Caitlin Sikora is a dancer, choreographer, and software engineer living in New York City. In her research, she focuses on qualitatively analyzing and animating motion capture data, along with developing wearable technologies to capture the sensory and emotional experience of human movement.
In her choreographic work, Ms. Sikora builds interactions between dancers and their environments, visualizing relationships through movement and media.