Nervous System Breakdown

Initially created for the WH&D First Draft Program 2023 by Summer Smith. This work explores themes of information overload and the exhaustion, disembodiment, and dissonance it may cause. The background projection, a collaboration between Smith and Nicholas Huhn features news clips, articles, and pop culture references that span the course of the information age. 

 

The sound design includes music by David Bazan, Electronic Grocer, Bahamas, and Cheap Trick.

 

The dancers during the premiere season were: Eona Carey, Crystal Gurrola, Myles Harris, Joi King, Mandy Milligan, Gabrielle Nicholas, and Julia Schaeffer

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"'Nervous System Breakdown” by Summer Smith is vigorously energetic. The full company of seven dancers, like fighter planes, circle a target, stall midair, then peel off and engage in an intense dogfight that has them running towards each other in a crosshatch pattern, barely missing one another. In front of a projected background showing water full of garbage and floating water bottles, the dancers form an assembly line of rolling human bodies that quickly morphs into a human staircase, with one brave, shaking spelunker daring to ascend. Smith’s “Nervous System Breakdown” moves at a breakneck pace but slows down at key moments to create stunning visualizations of bodies forming mountains, rivers, planes, birds, machinery, and all manner of pleasing imagery."

-Tristan Bruns, See Chicago Dance