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PERFORMANCE.WORK
LEVEL UP (2021)
In this narrative feature film, a 30-something dancer struggles to find her footing as she navigates life as a "mid-career" artist. Through persistence, courage, awkwardness and avoidance, she is confronted with and directed by her own nebulous idea of success and failure.
Infusing modern dance into a cringe comedy about bad dates, service-job humiliations, sexist auditions, brutal rehearsals, and unclear payoffs, the work is about the struggle that produces the work. Its laughs are slipping masks for pains and fears; one gripping set-piece conjures the hemmed-in feeling of an encounter with a menacing man.
COULD BE WORSE (2024)
“could be worse” evolved as a reflection, an archive, and a product of living and creating through a time of extreme doubt.
The work explores ideas of effort (real and perceived), individualized perceptions of success and failure, burnout and recovery, and the myriad of ways in which artists have to contort themselves to survive in capitalism while also dedicating their life to creating artwork. Drawing on influences from 1960s big-band orchestra, quirky instrumental pop and bossa nova, this warped fun-house dance duet hearkens back to a culture of perseverance and bootstrapping, of strict societal rules and heteronormative individualism. Through humor, music and theater, the show slowly peels back the facade of effortlessness until we find what we are left with in the aftermath.
SITES (2017 & 2018)
SITES Series is a performance-art map of Durham's rapid development and revitalization efforts, Seeking to illuminate the tensions between the human body and “the civic landscape we are so rapidly revising,” Stephanie Leathers (founder) has expanded the scope of SITES to invite other local dance artists to collaborate and respond to Durham's ever-changing cityscape. Anna Barker performs at the Durham Skate Park.
WHAT ABOUT THIS & OTHER FALSE STARTS (2017)
This solo exposes a confrontation of self-criticism and self-doubt that exists within the echo chamber of a solo creative process.
FEATURE PRESENTATION
(2016)
"Feature Presentation" was the second full-length work from RLP, which premiered June 10-12 2016 at the Trotter Building in downtown Durham, NC. The show explores themes about how we perform, both on an off stage. Tangling themselves in everything from exercise as egotistical performance to the tangled web of social media creating social comparisons, Barker and Wilks plumb serious depths.
IT'S NOT ME IT'S YOU
(2014)
"it's not me it's you", premiered at Motorco Music Hall in downtown Durham on November 8-9 2014. "it's not me it's you" has been shown subsequently as part of the American Dance Festival, the North Carolina Dance Festival, the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, APAP NYC, among other venues across the US.
AGAIN, BUTH THIS TIME WITH FEELING (2018)
Is there anything more terrifying in human existence than failure? In her third evening-length work, Durham artist Anna Barker presents a series of dance-theater vignettes exploring the ways in which we experience failure, either by writhing in the discomfort of it or by avoiding it at all costs. Presented as a foil of her recent work Feature Presentation (2016) that examined success and how we curate our own self-image, Again, but this time with feeling exposes the other side of the same coin- the darker, more difficult side. What happens when shooting for the stars doesn’t quite pan out? What happens
when we are left with our own, personalized feeling of failure? How do we navigate not only our greatest blunders, but also our routine, everyday missteps?
