On Saturday night at the Knoxville Museum of Art, Shadows & Light unfolded in real-time as a collaboration between KMA, Circle Modern Dance and composer William Wright.
The one-night-only, site-specific performance began with a piece in-the-round in Bailey Hall before radiating into various spaces throughout the museum. Dancers performed simultaneously in different exhibition halls, and audience members were free to roam—to linger in one space or follow their senses toward whatever compelled them next.
Art museums are usually still, quiet, reverent spaces. The art hangs on the wall or sits on a pedestal, and you look at it. If it’s really interesting, you stand there a while and think about it. Shadows & Light aimed to explore—if not dismantle—the boundaries and negative space that surround visual art. It invited conversation with the art and even, through the movement or stillness of the dancers, physical embodiment of it.
At times, the dancers’ bodies seemed like kinetic sculptures themselves. The works were varied but consistently responsive to the art and humans around them. Highlights of the program, with choreographers noted:
- “Superposition” (Angela Hill) started things off with a kaleidoscope of motion and symmetry, inspired by Richard Jolley’s Cycles of Life and the quantum idea that observation alters reality. The audience, arranged in a circle, were active participants in that experiment—watching and being watched.
- “P(art)(take)” (Nate Barrett + dancers) was a structured improvisation, with dancers mapping their own way through movement, space and human connection: “This is about being a human with humans in a museum.”
- “Lucid” and “Soft Sleep” (Angela Hill + Jill Frere) were dreamy, sensory pieces that slowed the pace and invited interiority. Performed in the Higher Ground gallery, Soft Sleep was a love letter to naps, nervous systems and the liminal space between waking and dreaming.
- “Warp and Weft” (Angela Hill + dancers) unraveled and re-wove ideas about pattern, chaos and collective repair in response to the textile-inspired Cajon Desastre installation and the themes of technological progress embedded in Electricity for All.
- “Rhetorical Fallacies Paralyze the Aching Heart, or ChatGPT Prompts to Chill To on a Summer Evening” (Kimberly Matibag) mashed up algorithmic language and hyper-local hypothesis into a glitchy, wry, postmodern movement poem.
- Bringing the audience back to Bailey Hall, “Electric Field Theory” (Heather Coker Hawkins) traced electricity’s role from the cellular level to the social—volatility, disruption, connection, charge.
- “Things You Lose and Find to Minimize When You Put Stuff in a Box” (Kimberly Matibag) explored the emotional and psychological cost of containment—what’s lost when we make ourselves smaller to fit in, and what clarity can emerge when we choose that shape with intention.
- “Free Admission” (Jill Frere) closed the program with a celebration of public art and inner freedom. The balloon pops at the end were *chef’s kiss*.
The soundscape threaded throughout was composed by William Wright, one of Knoxville’s most interesting musical minds. Because the KMA is usually so quiet, any infusion of sound always feels deliciously subversive. Wright, a local indie-pop establishment who also happens to be a Berklee-trained composer and film/TV music producer, proved once again that mastery of form gives you license to mess with it.
Before the performance began, choreographer Angela Hill addressed the audience with a reminder that there is no exploration without vulnerability. “Just know that we’re all a little bit lost, because this is a new adventure,” she said. “It’s OK. We’re going to figure it out.”
A particular kind of giddiness rippled through the standing-room-only room. I love that feeling when you realize you’re surrounded by people who are up for it, whatever it turns out to be. That shared willingness to wander and to stay curious. To not need all the answers right away. It’s clear that there’s an appetite for this sort of creative experimentation in Knoxville, and that the artists here are more than ready to meet the moment.
When I interviewed KMA director Steven Matijcio earlier this year, he described a collaborative, interdisciplinary vision and continued that stream of thought on Saturday night: “This is not just a performer in front of work. These are dancers, they’re artists, they’re choreographers that have truly thought about the museum—its architecture, the exhibitions, the art on display. They have very much established a reciprocity and exchange, a dialogue that we see in various places throughout the museum. And I’m so grateful for them because this is exactly the type of collaboration that I hope we can continue.”
And that’s what it felt like. Not just dance in a museum but a museum, dancing.
Knoxville Museum of Art (1050 World’s Fair Park Drive) is FREE and open to the public. Visit the website for hours and details.
Circle Modern Dance has been providing fun and affordable adult dance education in Knoxville for over 30 years: “It is our philosophy that everyone is a dancer, and every body has the right to dance.” Visit the website to learn more about how to get involved.