HAUNTS - 2022-2025

HAUNTS is a highly visual and kinesthetic performance installation that weaves together the grief narratives of multidisciplinary artists to create processes for remembering, memorializing, healing, and visioning the new after loss. This audience-engaged performance work follows dancers (Jennifer Dignan, Steph McIssac, Kristen Stake, Amy Wasielewski, and Hannah Kumaski-choreographer) as they move grief in its many forms through an everchanging set shaped by multimedia and projection (Sangeeth Kumaski, sound (Kayla Fong), and dance film (Sangeeth Kumaski and Amy Wasielewski). Using choreography layered with AI-generated tools and technologies, reality softens into moving images that tell the stories of transformation from the ghostly past to future new worlds where imagination awakens through a dream-like state. With the performance as the collaborative center, HAUNTS is a landscape of space, sound, and dance that walks us through the transformation that’s only possible when our stories of loss are held collectively.

Haunts I
Shown at Subcircle dollop- January 2023- Biddeford, ME
Kinetech Arts Dance Hack- September 2023- Oakland, CA
Meeting House Arts- October 2023- Freeport, ME

Haunts II
SPACE Studios (Sangeeth Kumaski Artist-in-Residence)- May 2025- Portland, ME
Black Hole Hollow Residency- June 2025- Arlington, VT

Funded in part by a grant from the Maine Arts Commission, an independent state agency supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, New England Foundation for the Arts, Black Hole Hollow Residency Center, Kinetech Arts Dance Hack and Subcircle

Photography by Robbie Sweeny, Image Stills from Videography by Jorge Cousineau, Amy Wasielewski, Sangeeth Kumaski