Christopher Williams has been devoted to performing and crafting choreographic works in New York City and abroad since 1999. A curious alchemist who dissolves boundaries between various art forms, he has developed a unique style that combines experimental dance with visual art, theater, puppetry, and live music. Preferring to cast each new work specifically rather than maintaining a set company, he carefully assembles a wide variety of brilliant performers that juxtapose many body types and span many ages in order to instill his work with a distinctive corporeal counterpoint.
In conjunction with a personal passion for early art, literature, and music of many cultures, Williams has recently made works inspired by historical wonders and curiosities that refract and re-imagine the sensibilities of lost ages in contemporary contexts. By employing his own choreographic vocabulary along with stylized visual and live sonorous elements, his pieces produce the effect of entering fantastical new worlds. Williams is particularly interested in expanding live performance as an art form by re-examining the relationship of historical literature, early and contemporary music, prosthetic costume, mask, and puppetry to the movement of the human body. He notices harmony between seemingly disparate forms due to their common potential for movement, and finds compelling instances of visual, emotional, and spatial polyphony therein. The body of a dancer can move independently or become an armature upon which to sculpt, a musical vessel, a visage upon which masks may appear, a medium through which puppets can rouse, or even a sort of time machine in his work. Williams believes that work inclusive of a variety of creatively combined elements provides both a powerful sense of vital spectacle and ritual for audiences and offers a forum where the public imagination is encouraged to soar.
Time in residence at The Watermill Center will be spent further developing choreography, music, and designs for an original “choreographic opera cycle” written, directed, designed, and choreographed by Christopher Williams, co-designed by Andrew Jordan and Carol Binion, and set to music by composer Gregory Spears. Inspired ultimately by the lost mythology and obscured faerie legends of the Insular Celtic cultures in Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, the Isle of Man, and Ireland, the work harkens back to fragmentary medieval literature such as the Welsh romance cycle known as the Mabinogion and the Breton Lais of Marie de France. Spurred by an interest in the origins of the ancient mythological tropes found within these texts and legends, original tales that tap into a primordial, pan-mythic milieu from whence the aforementioned sources sprang serve as fodder for the work’s six-part libretto. Special attention will be devoted to on scenes from the third part of the larger cycle, the Welsh branch, with four of the work’s primary collaborators and select performers.