"In my improvisational explorations, I achieve a state where my brain quiets and my physical sensations are LOUD. My body falls from action to action, looping back, distending, recoiling, finding tiny articulations."
In 2010 and 2011, choreographer Meg Foley (b. 1981) inserted unexpected performance into ordinary life with her 3:15 project, in which she created a dance, wherever she was, every day at exactly 3:15 p.m. This project allowed her to think critically about what constitutes dance—an investigation that has evolved into the core of her practice. Foley explores how every movement, no matter how ordinary or seemingly inconsequential, informs a responding movement, and so on, in an ongoing creative feedback loop. Her dances are often marked by specific and small gestures, suggesting intimacy or speaking to the innate awkwardness of the human body. "I aim for simultaneous abandon and command of my body, surrendering control while scanning and noticing how an action evolves or transitions," Foley says. "I notice decisions without interfering in their making. The dance is pure architecture and sensation."
Foley is a 2012 recipient of the Philadelphia-based Independence Foundation Fellowship. Her work has been presented locally by the FringeArts Festival, Bowerbird, and Vox Populi gallery, and nationally in the Movement Research series at New York's Judson Church, at Scripps College in Claremont, CA, and at TEDx Phoenixville. The whole time in the meanwhile, a new choreographed work made in collaboration with Chris Forsyth, a 2011 Pew Fellow, and light designer Lenore Doxsee, was presented by Thirdbird in January 2013. In the spring of 2014, Foley participated in TAPAS, a month-long collaborative residency culminating in a performance as part of Pasión y Arte's 2014 Philadelphia Flamenco Festival. Foley has also received a 2014 grant from the Center for action is primary, which continues and expands upon her 3:15 project.
