Breeanne Camille Saxton is a performance artist currently based in Portland, Oregon where she is thrilled to begin working with WolfBird Dance Company. After completing her BFA in Modern Dance at the University of Utah in 2015, she worked as a free lance dance artist in Salt Lake City working with companies such as Ririe Woodbury Dance Company, Utah Opera, LoveDanceMore, Porridge For Goldilocks, Springboard Danse Montreal, North West Dance Project, Shaun Boyle, and Molly Heller among others. Choreographically she has been busy, completing 5 works in 2015 and currently completing her fourth work of 2016.                                         

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Breeanne's performance research is currently focused on the study of full expression and its potential to liberate, ressurect, create and heighten the power of our own personalities. Much of her undergraduate movement research was concerned with the multiplicity of identity, its origins, and the thesis task of tracing the ownership of one's identity. This research brought about multi-faceted performance works that engaged the full range of performance possibilities for performers while simultaneously immersing audience members in an interactive environment. Rather than seeing the myriad of external and internal forces of influence that have authored one's identity as an indication of pathetic passivity, Breeanne utilizes the bounty of imprints, indentations, and traces of identity as an abundant spring of power. She often embraces her perception of childhood and child-like behavior as a movement generation tool and conceptual springboard; she is in search of the child in each of us. Her choreographic work, at its core, illuminates our connectivity and cultivates empathy.

 

Her background in theater and love for American literature has inspired her to utilize the voice as an integral piece of the performing body and allowed her to be explicit in her story telling. Unafraid of sampling and referencing the literature she loves hand in hand with her own writing and performance, the structure of her pieces reflect the structure of identity: fragmented and episodic, reflective of the surrounding environment, reliant on the people in the room, and represented and experienced by the full mind, body, and spirit. Through the creation of specific performances, audience members and performers alike may shake hands with a version of one's self long forgotten or exiled as a child, bring to life a growing self too infantile to animate in 'the real world', and/or acknowledge our certain interdependence and attachment to the systems around us.  

 

A primary concern in her process is crafting every interaction that her performers have with the audience during the performance to create a highly specific relationship. Breeanne's carefully coordination of this relationship brings the audience closer to the performance experience, giving each individual a stake in their experience. This concern motivates her construction of sound and visual installations that support and surround many of her formal dance pieces. From the moment an audience member enters one of her productions, the work is already taking place. The piece does not begin when the lights dim and the dancing starts, but rather the beginning and end of the performance occur out of sight of the audience, long before they arrive. Her desire to cultivate an empathic response from the audience drives the investigation into the correlation between a performer’s interaction with an audience member and the degree of empathy felt by the audience. The productions she has created in the past have been immersive, and she intends on continuing to research theatrical immersion and the dynamics of audience involvement within the choreography of an evening.