RED
An evening length work of improvisation, image making, and emergent composition
November 1 + 2, 2026
7 PM
The Fruit, Durham, NC
Durham Fringe Festival
RED is a work of improvisation and image making inspired by Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, Sara Ahmed’s writing on orientation in Queer Phenomenology, and Susan Sgorbati’s research and practices in Emergent Improvisation.
Working through contemplative composition and live improvisation, dancers and musicians build and dissolve scenes in real time, listening for what emerges between bodies, gestures, sound, and the changing attention of the room.
Narrative gathers through image, tone, rhythm, proximity, and relationship, exploring movement toward one another, the loss of bearings, and transformation through contact.
Each performance becomes a living world, intimate, apophatic, and alive.
RED will be performed November 1 and 2, 2026, as part of Durham Fringe Festival.
Anna M. Maynard
Anna Maynard is an interdisciplinary artist, choreographer, photographer, and improvisation teacher based in North Carolina. Her work moves through dance, image making, somatic research, and live performance, with particular attention to perception, embodiment, relationship, and collective composition.
Her practice is rooted in improvisation and the study of how meaning emerges through bodies in relation to one another, to space, and to the changing conditions of a room. Across performance, teaching, and facilitation, she develops structures that invite deep listening, responsiveness, and what she describes as Exquisite Attention: a practice of directing focus with intentional presence toward internal and external experience.
Anna holds an MFA in Dance and Performance from Smith College, where she taught improvisation, composition, somatic practices, and perception based movement research. Her work is informed by more than a decade of study in Contact Improvisation, the Underscore, contemporary dance, ensemble improvisation, and somatic practice.
COLLABORATORS IN RED
Caitlyn SwettGinger Wagg Tyler Benjamin
Amy French is a writer and dancer who isn’t quite sure where to call home. In life and in art she finds the most generative practices to be those that operate with an ethos of collaboration, experimentation, and safe harbor. She dances, always, with grateful feet.
Ginger Wagg (aka Wild Actions - a movement based investigative project) is an improviser, collaborator, instigator, troublemaker, and general nuisance. "Are you ok?" is the most common question heard during performances - and the answer is no. WA's body of work (interactive time-based installations, music/sound/noise bands, community schemes) insists on hounding the unspoken rules we follow as artists, audiences, and supporters. Chat with her anytime about disorientation, conflict, & the natural state of complexity/contradiction/beauty we all inhabit by simply being alive.
Tyler Benjamin (he/they) is a performance artist with more dreams and ideas than time to make them come true. They're based in Durham, NC, and they do stuff like puppetry, live sound effects, projection and protest art, and dance/movement. As long as there's some element of close bonding and relational exploration at play in an art project, Tyler is interested.
Amy French
Anna WhitakerColeman Churchill
Coleman Churchill is not made of paper. He is a massage therapist and bodyworker. He is interested in the power of human attention. He is curious about dreams, inheritance, divine emptiness, and the mystery of being alive. He is happiest in motion. He will not shut up about Geryon.
emily liptow
Sophie Teachout loves dance so much. She's been dancing around North Carolina for a couple decades now. Since 2025, she has had the privilege of being Ms. T to the students of Graham High School, where she teaches dance. She knows no greater pleasure than being here, right now, dancing with you.
Owen FitzgeraldChelsea ThalerStephen Mooneyhan
Anna Whitaker is a thinker, dancer, and facilitator who can most often be found in shared spaces of movement, whether dialogical or somatic. She seeks to operate with a relational ethic of hospitality that sees self in Other, leaving room for improvisation that arises within uncontrollability.
Sophie Teachout
Caitlyn Swett is a NC-based dancer and sound artist. Her soundscapes are porous the stories of our bodies, generating a dynamic and delicate environment for them to heard and felt. Learn more at www.caitlynswett.work.
emily liptow is an interdisciplinary artist, movement teacher, and guide from the watershed of Lake Erie. She orients towards a playful, colorful existence while tending to the quiet, vulnerable, and dark places within, making art about it with friends. Obsessions include: group dance experience of all kinds, sisters, puppets, homemaking, and personal and collective transformation.
Owen FitzGerald is a fiction writer, disguised as a songwriter and musician, from Durham, North Carolina. His creative work is narrative, lyrically precise, and worried about the dislocation of self. Owen is also: a Public Defender for Durham County, a father, and caretaker of obsolete and obscenely powerful guitar amplifiers. Owen hopes you'll have a great day tomorrow and the day after tomorrow too.
Chelsea Thaler is a performer, artist, and educator. Her work lies at the intersections of physical theater, clown, dance, improvisation, and the creation of new works of devised, ensemble-based theater. Chelsea is into the absurd, the whimsical, flowers, and making the invisible visible. Chelsea has attended many prestigious clown schools where she received excellent grades. She does not live in Durham anymore but wishes she does.
Stephen Mooneyhan is a drummer who has been creating and performing for over two decades. He is fixated on the absurd, and often agrees to new endeavors, musical or otherwise, in search of new or unique experiences. He has at least four matching outfits with his dog, Murphy.