Set Design for REVOLVE by Articulate Austin: Terrain

Terrain by Esther Bramlett 

Performed at: REVOLVE: A Movement Display


Working with a multi-disciplined artist like Esther Bramlett was a rewarding experience that involved months of planning and hard work. Terrain was a collective project about emotional intimacy, dependency, shame, and personal exploration. Experiencing these dancers interact with the set gave life to the performance and brought elements of the Texas landscape to a modern dance piece. With dancers Angela Benz, Kylie Phillips, Devon Adams, and Danielle Storey-Loredo, and music by Dan Block, Terrain simultaneously fought and embraced various colors of love to tell a narrative about finding your place within the cosmos of intimacy.


“Sometimes I wish we were given a map when we fell in love, to not only help us navigate a new person but also ourselves. A map that showed us all the other roads that our mainstream culture and society try to block us from experiencing. A map that avoided painful miscommunications, foggy roads, forgotten trails, and most of all, a map that could help us navigate the deep shame of “otherness” perpetuated by the mainstream normalized outline of “boy meets girl, boy marries girl, live happily ever after”. Love is much more complicated than we can imagine and it is important to remember that your map of love is not the same as mine. We should relish in the journey, and take as many detours as we see necessary. Relationships can feel familiar like the places where we grew up or unfamiliar like an uncovered route to a new place. Love is multi-layered and can change as suddenly as the weather. This piece is a snippet of my very personal internal journey across some new Terrain”

-Esther Bramlett - ebdance.com 


Photography by Joe Lucky - joelucky.online

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