Crack of Dawn

A durational companion to Call It a Day.

In January 2009, I sat with my then-partner at the kitchen table of an Amish couple, Samuel and Martha Herschberger, in rural Illinois. We tried to have a conversation across differences in belief, language, and way of life. That quiet encounter became the starting point of Call It a Day, a performance shaped by repetition, misalignment and the impulse to understand.

In developing that work, we generated hours of longform improvisation as we stretched and looped the remembered conversation. Eventually, those improvisations became their own performance.

-

Crack of Dawn is a durational, drop-in-drop-out piece that unfolds continuously from sunrise to sunset, shaped by the time zone and time of year. I perform alongside three others as we spend the day working and reworking versions of that same conversation, without breaks, meals included.

What begins as structured repetition gradually unravels. As fatigue sets in, patterns emerge and dissolve. Jokes recur. Façades slip. Familiarity turns strange. Time After Time might become karaoke. Set against a live, responsive soundtrack, the performance becomes a kind of slow-motion kaleidoscope of connection and disconnection. An endurance test of attention, empathy and miscommunication.

Though it shares its conceptual core with Call It a Day, Crack of Dawn offers something distinct: the act of actually spending the day together. Durational time becomes a material in itself, inviting a different kind of attention, a slower unfolding and folding back again. In that extended stretch, things surface alongside the actual span of a day that couldn’t in a conventional performance—accumulating, drifting or escaping altogether before reappearing in unexpected places.