Ongoing Duet

Ongoing Duet is a collaborative performance project between longtime friends and collaborators Meredith Bove and Barbie Diewald. The work emerges from a multi-year, research-based practice moving between dance, voice, relational improvisation, and queer and ecological thought. Developed through sustained studio inquiry, the project asks what attention does: how it orients bodies, how it gathers and disperses experience, and how it produces permeable boundaries between creative practice and everyday life, familial memory and collectively imagined futures, and human and more-than-human temporalities.

The work is structured through open-ended questions that function as both compositional frameworks and movement scores: What would change if we could experience deep time and time lapse at once? What would change if breaking down were also building up? These questions do not seek resolution. Instead, Ongoing Duet sustains a practice of attunement that interrupts habitual modes of knowing, reorienting performers toward processes of continuous, often imperceptible change. 

Ongoing Duet engages postmodern and somatic lineages, drawing from Deborah Hay, Trisha Brown, Janet Adler, Lisa Nelson, and the indeterminacy practices of John Cage and Merce Cunningham. At the same time, it attends to embodied familial inheritance and to the accumulated knowledge of a decade-long friendship—tracing how gestures, affects, and patterns are carried, repeated, and subtly transformed, often below the level of explicit articulation.