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TONIGHT ONLY

A new piece by @therefore about a burning place and a smoldering person.

Featuring @nguyen.diamond and @dothouse0 .

Part of a performance at @arcdeepellum by my @utdbass graduate performance class.

Doors 7pm. Performance 8 pm. Free.

“The Thinnest Hint of a Greenish Glint” is a 15 minute performance & sound piece in two parts for the Ginger Roots Asian American Arts Festival @gingerroots.tx.

Performed by Kit Presley @kitniicco and Kristen Duong @3amanhtus, written by @therefore, costume design by @yxxjixtxng @itszacknguyen

Thanks to @daaartclub @whatsgoinghahn
Created by current & former @ut_dallas students & professor Dean Terry at @utdbass in ACTS Anechoic Chamber & Transmedia Studio @acts.utd

“The Thinnest Hint of a Greenish Glint” is a 15 minute performance & sound piece in two parts for the Ginger Roots Asian American Arts Festival @gingerroots.tx.

Performed by Kit Presley @kitniicco and Kristen Duong @3amanhtus, written by @therefore, costume design by @yxxjixtxng @itszacknguyen

Thanks to @daaartclub @whatsgoinghahn
Created by current & former @ut_dallas students & professor Dean Terry at @utdbass in ACTS Anechoic Chamber & Transmedia Studio @acts.utd

God’s eye view of PHANTOMs at @artsmission
Featuring @hillyholsonback @birdseed4girls @kitniicco @lauraonsale
Live video by our ace video team @kylepedia @schmanlyr Lighting design by @zilla.penney
videography by Kevin Sweet.

#performanceart

God’s eye view of PHANTOMs at @artsmission
Featuring @hillyholsonback @birdseed4girls @kitniicco @lauraonsale
Live video by our ace video team @kylepedia @schmanlyr Lighting design by @zilla.penney
videography by Kevin Sweet.

#performanceart

🟢 M O V E M E N T S 🟢 tonight at @arcdeepellum

Thursday Dec 11 @ 7-9pm, come out to the free performance night presented by @colab.atec inside the DÉJÀ VU exhibition (2602 Main St, Dallas)

An avant-garde performance experience curated by UTD professor Dean Terry @therefore , including @tinavahed @3amanhtus @dothouse0 @nguyen.diamond @zahrajafarpour_artworks @parulbhatia01 @nealma13 🎶 💃

🎥: BTS during rehearsal by @wafflesweekly
Supported by @utdbass

A new piece by @therefore about a burning place and a smoldering person.
Featuring @nguyen.diamond and @dothouse0

MOVEMENTS Performance night
DEC 11th, 2025 |7-9 PM
ARC GALLERY - 2602 Main St, Dallas

What is a Kiss? Live from PHANTOMs

Excerpt featuring Kit Presley @kitniicco
See the full, devastating video on our YouTube channel (link in bio)

Description from the PHANTOMs book (excerpt, full version available via download):
This is a piece about a particular kind of loneliness and a specific moment within it when someone realizes they have forgotten, and can’t imagine, the simple act of a kiss. It’s about sinking into that moment and dwelling on it, amplifying it, recognizing how alien it has become—and maybe always was. The piece is minimalist and stark, with Patrick Murphy playing a sparse piano part treated by Tyler Haws, and Kit performing, seated directly in front of the first row. A single spotlight illuminates her, and the rest of the space is dark. She enters by dragging a metal chair down the center aisle, scraping and banging it all the way to the front, using the sound of the wooden floor and the natural reverberation of the sanctuary itself. “Kiss” was the emotional nadir of Phantoms, and KP drew us down there every night.

Though “Kiss” is quiet and solemn in presentation, it is anything but in KP’s preparation just beforehand. Before each performance she would run up and down the stairs outside the venue. This got her heart rate up and into a state where, when she entered the space dragging the chair, she was amped up and properly unsettled. Sitting and speaking, she was out of breath and heaving, yet speaking slowly and quietly. The audience had no idea about any of this, and the contrast between her physical state and the tone and pace of her speaking created a counterpoint that lifted it beyond a simple, sombre reading.

CREDITS:
Performance: Kit Presley @kitniicco
Piano: Patrick Murphy @pdmxm
4 channel sound & enhancements: Tyler Haws
Concept, Writing, Creative Direction: Dean Terry
Performance Direction: Hilly Holsonback @hillyholsonback
Lighting & Stage: Zilla Penney @zilla.penney
Original Videography: Kevin Sweet
Venue: Arts Mission Oak Cliff @artsmission
Video Mixed and edited by Dean Terry

My solo guitar piece in Phantoms, live from @artsmission

Notes from the Phantoms book (link to pdf in bio)
This is a solo piece for tenor electric guitar. It is placed in the show to help bring everyone up from the depths that @kitniicco takes us to in “What is a Kiss” and into the absurd comedic tone of “Archery Kit.” (videos coming soon). It’s a tough ask. The guitar parts were strung together from various sketches I had written on the tenor, with an improvised bridge in the middle, played over a rhythmic loop. This part was different every night. I purposefully placed a difficult section within an already challenging piece. If everyone else has to do hard things in front of a live audience, so do I. It’s part of our ethos, and live improvisation was one of the original motivations for creating Therefore in the first place. It was especially satisfying to spotlight the guitar after leaving it out entirely in Poems for Broken Screens. And it rung out beautifully in the space thanks to Tyler’s four channel enhancements.

Live video & projections by @kylepedia and @schmanlyr Lighting by @zilla.penney
Original video documentation by Kevin Sweet

#guitarsolo #guitar #tenorguitar

A Valentine video poem from Therefore, performed over 29 days by @ohloreme with additional vocals by @kitniicco.

“not now anymore” is a longitudinal video poem where each word was recorded on a different day during February 2024, a leap year. So, a 29 word poem sent a day at a time over 29 days. This is the poem in the form of a single run on sentence:

“Anymore now when you speak a month passes before the words decay and depart from now so from now on leave all your words in the not now anymore.”

The structure of the poem and its production mirrors the theme, which is how time contracts and expands based on occupying thoughts. In this case, someone’s words have taken a month to “depart and decay” in the mind of the receiver. Most things people say are forgettable, and often we don’t remember hearing them in the first place. Others linger, and stretch time of their own accord, and we expand and contract with them. Here, a single sentence is stretched across a month, then a year passes before it can be parsed and represented in video form here.

At the start, Lindsay was advised to record each word at a time of the day when she was filled with feeling in a weighted, charged moment. We all have these moments—or hopefully so—at least once a day (and we should put them to creative use). In addition, Lindsay spoke each word very slowly so that in editing they could be sped up, creating a visible time effect. In editing, all manner of time alterations were made, mostly improvisational (despite editing software being resistant to improvisation). “not now anymore” is made up of layer upon layer of differing time scales, which, from my experience, is how we live.

#videoexperimental #videopoetry #videoart #poetry

DARK DECEMBER: I’m going dark on social media the month of December.

Normally I’m offline most of the summer, nowhere-ing in the desert. But this year, and maybe all future ones, a winter hiatus is also in order. The work of therefore takes extended solitude and insulation from the online world.

That said, Therefore has been busy this fall, with performance videos in production and two books of our last two performances. All of this will be coming on my return starting in January.

If you’d to hang out I’ll be at these upcoming events IRL:
@spngalleryutd for @3amanhtus performance 12/7
@newmediacontemporary 1 Year Event 12/13
@dianarojas.studio at UTA Planetarium 12/20
My regular coffee shop mornings M-F (writing a new book & the next performance(s))
The anechoic chamber at UTD most afternoons and evenings.

I’m available via text, Signal, email studiotherefore@gmail.com or UTD Teams DM. If you are not on our mailing list consider joining (link in bio).

See you soon.

#darkdecember

“Twig” from PHANTOMs live at Arts Mission Oak Cliff 2024 featuring Laura Kim and Kit Presley with Patrick Murphy and Dean Terry.

THIS VERSION HAS BEEN EDITED FOR TIME AND REFORMATTED TO FIT YOUR (WRONGLY) VERTICAL SCREEN. See the full version via the link in our bio.

The initial image in the poem was triggered by memories of characters falling off cliffs in old cartoons, where they would miraculously save themselves by grabbing a twig that just so happened to be sticking out. This is of course impossible. Somehow, I thought this would be a suitable metaphor for something serious. The absurd, the sublime, and the stupid are co-conspirators.

“Twig” is loosely my variation on the Myth of Sisyphus, where instead of pushing a rock up a hill, you’re falling, saving yourself, and falling again, with some absurdities thrown in for good measure (“if it doesn’t pull her arm off...”). “Twig” is “fallenness”, a sabotaged sublimity. Here the elements of being in a body in the world are fully reduced: Hello world. You’re falling. You have hands. Now what? Grab a twig with one of them. Now what about the other one? The twig breaks and you’re falling again, repeating the cycle.

“Twig” was a piece that lingered as a poem for over a decade. It was only with the current iteration of Therefore as a performance engine that it was able to be realized live. It was a full group effort, requiring tight coordination with careful watching and listening to vary the tempo of sound, image, and movement synchronously. It’s minimalist and maximalist at once, like most of our work.

~Credits~
Movement: Laura Hyunjhee Kim @lauraonsale
Voice: Kit Presley @kitniicco
Concept, poem, synthesizers, creative direction: Dean Terry @therefore
Minimoog: Patrick Murphy @pdmxm
Performance direction: Hilly Holsonback @hillyholsonback
Live sound: Tyler Haws
Live projections: Chanlyr Jordan @schmanlyr
Live lighting: Zilla Penney @zilla.penney
Original animation: Raquel Piantino @raquelpiantino
Original videography: Kevin Sweet
Venue: @artsmission
Theatrical gravitas: Abel Flores @abel_flores_jr

Everyone who worked on this project are from @utd_arts @ut_dallas

Excerpt from “The Bench” live at PHANTOMs. See the full uncropped version on our YouTube channel - link in bio

Featuring Hilly Holsonback @hillyholsonback and Abel Flores @abel_flores_jr
Music by Patrick Murphy @pdmxm with Kit Presley @kitniicco & Dean Terry @therefore

Live sound: Tyler Haws
Lighting design: Zilla Penney @zilla.penney
Live video: Kyle Kondas @kylepediaand Chanlyr Jordan @schmanlyr
Original video documentation: Kevin Sweet

Co-produced with and performed at @artsmission Arts Mission Oak Cliff May 23 - June 1 2024.

cc @performingthebody @performance_review

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#performanceart #performanceartist