ChrisMastersDance (CMD) is a Brooklyn-based performance company founded in 2012 comprising a team of diverse interdisciplinary collaborators whose individual and indelible histories and perspectives provide invaluable contributions as we interrogate a wide breadth of topics and themes. Recently, CMD has sustainably grown its scale and impact to better advocate for labor equity and inclusion & integration with diverse communities, striving to illuminate and overcome prevalent and pernicious norms that continually exploit and undervalue artistic collaborators.

CMD’s core philosophy is that the work should function as a container, seamlessly blending movement invention, theoretical investigation, and character-driven theatricality to facilitate comprehensive world-building. Like a container, the work can be unpacked in myriad ways, fostering greater accessibility and connectivity to diverse audiences. The primary objective is to create an empathetic avenue for dialogue between performer, witness, and community. The New York Times notes the work is "psychologically driven[...] you might want to be in a mindful state," while Critical Dance says “it is exquisite.”

The gulf between intention and consequence is massive, but where others seek control, we seek out generative processes which encourage that gulf to become an ocean. Our task-based approach to the generation of material— movement, words, music, film—centers the various voices in the room, carving various pathways for witnesses to investigate their assumptions and reactions and draw their own conclusions. This is not a declaration, but rather, an interrogation. You are encouraged to embrace your unique history and perspective to ask your own questions, and provide your own answers. The work remains fundamentally unfinished without you.

CMD’s body of work includes 20+ dance works for 1–18+ performers, from 4 to 90 minutes, in proscenium theatres as well as alternative performance spaces, with immersive work being site-adaptive to richly interact with individual locations.

Notable highlights include: Mausoleum (Brooklyn Academy of Music & eXit SPACE | NOD Theater in Seattle), the work-in-progress of which was invited to be shown at Danspace Project by Ishmael Houston-Jones; A Willful Host (La MaMa Moves!), Exit Strategies (Triskelion), Evergreen (Judson Memorial Church in NYC, Max M. Fisher Music Center in Detroit, and The Iron Factory in Philadelphia), Veiled Threat—a 2.5-hours immersive dance-theatre piece across 4 floors—which was commissioned for Meng Jinghui’s Fengchao Theatre in Beijing and ran for 80+ performances, the dance film A Feast That Never Comes, recipient of 700+ selections and awards (including 100+ Best Music Video awards and 50+ Best Experimental/Screendance) in the most competitive year in film festival history, and years of professional level classes at Mark Morris Dance Center (among many other professional schools).

Mausoleum

Performed at Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Fishman Space, June 2–4, 2023. Later performed at eXit SPACE | NOD Theater (Seattle), June 23–24, 2023.

A 70-minute performance for 4+ dancers, featuring live simulcast projection and original music and poetry.

What precedes remembrance? In the midst of shouldering unrelenting pressure in an unsustainable form of life and work, how can we document our experiences? How can we find the time to pause, memorialize, and learn?

We build a Mausoleum. A place to acknowledge and remember a past that has been laid to rest. A dance work that considers and interrupts what has come, making way for tomorrow.

Finding underpinning Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Sartre’s No Exit, Piketty’s Capital and Ideology, and Virgil’s Aeneid, we interrogate these questions through rigorous generative tasks, empowering collaborators to embrace their individual and indelible histories to forge a Mausoleum in the fire of their unique experiences and perspectives.

Overstimulating and nonstop, the work investigates our overconsumption of media, addiction to drama, inertia that concretizes unsustainable forms of life and work, and the inextricable link between love and loss.

More information about Mausoleum can be found at this webpage.

A Feast That Never Comes

Shot in Fleischmanns, New York // 700+ awards and selections in the most competitive year in film festival history.

A series of four music videos for Ex-Fiancée's debut album, A Feast That Never Comes, interrogating the relationship between technology and constructed identity, nostalgia, and the constant performance of the everyday.

Four characters inhabit cycles within cycles of contentment, discontentment, inertia, movement, desire, and betrayal. A story emerges—told through the marriage of music and dance—functioning as a set of nesting dolls, inviting you to uncover as many layers as you wish.

The musical, lyrical, and visual motifs that repeat throughout the project may be taken as clues to the artist’s intent. But from there, you’re on your own. The only intent that prevails in A Feast That Never Comes is that of openness and investigation; there is no right answer, but there’s also no right question. You are hereby invited to ask your own questions, and provide your own answers. The work remains fundamentally unfinished without you.

Veiled Threat

Premiere: April 2015
Fengchao Theatre, Beijing, China
Commission by North Park Theatre Culture Co., Meng Jinghui

A 3-hour site-specific immersive dance-theatre work—using both traditional and non-traditional locations throughout the Fengchao Theatre—built in collaboration with the cast, focusing on the relationship between veneer and intent, drawing upon local Chinese parables blended with Western narratives to create a largely-wordless performance that proved accessible to audiences regardless of their cultural background.

Created in a mere 9 days with a non-English-speaking cast of 10 actors versed in physical theatre—and featuring an original score across 8 distinct sound zones over 3 stories, which totaled 24 hours of music composed and produced in only 32 working hours—Veiled Threat went on to run in Beijing for over 100 performances.

Exit Strategies

Premiere: December 2014
Triskelion Arts, Brooklyn, NY
Commission by Triskelion Presents for the inaugural season in their new space

A 90-minute performance for 6–18+ dancers, designed to incorporate members of the local dance community wherever it is performed—even should the core cast be composed of ChrisMastersDance company members.

This work investigates the phenomenology of black holes by establishing parallels to the question of personal and collective submerged identities—at what point do we cross the event horizon, and find ourselves unable to embody the parts of our identity which we’ve chosen to hide?

Rife with storytelling, intricate patterns, and lush partnering, we interrogate themes of identity, home, and necessary chaos in an increasingly exposed yet secretive world—will the submerged aspects of our individual and collective selves come to see the light of day, or have we gone too far? Is it possible to come back to where we may never have truly been?

A Willful Host

Premiere: May 2014
La MaMa ETC, New York, NY

A 35-minute performance for 4 dancers, featuring a genre-bending live performance by CMD’s resident composer, Ex-Fiancée.

Investigating the relationship between self-exploitation and self-empowerment, this work focuses on the strength that we can find when inviting parasitic relationships into our circle—being willfully taken advantage of can provide purpose, but do you end up as a saint or a martyr?

Evergreen

Premiere: December 2013
Triskelion Arts, Brooklyn, NY
Split Bill Commission
Reconstruction: August 2015
Judson Memorial Church, New York, NY & Max M. Fisher Music Center, Detroit, MI

A 40-minute performance for 6–8 dancers which has been shown on four different occasions, in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Manhattan, and Detroit.

Underpinned by J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, we investigate and critique the connection between our youth-driven culture and nostalgia, teasing out how the archetypal Peter and Wendy syndromes tie us inexorably to a fetishization of youth that frequently discounts the value of maturity and independence.

A highly-flexible work that has been thrice reconstructed, it is easily adaptable to non-traditional performance venues, while retaining its structure and underlying themes.

the ghost of my legs

Premiere: April 2011
Public Space One, Iowa City, IA
Reconstruction: January 2013
Irondale Center, Brooklyn, NY

Initial configuration as a movement installation, later reframed for an evening length, in the round, dance work, exploring the phenomenology of loss, using as phantom limbs as underpinning.

Chris Masters (Director, Choreographer)

Chris Masters has been making dance work for over twenty years, and is currently director of ChrisMastersDance (CMD). His work has been presented at Judson Memorial Church, Salvatore Capezio Theatre, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, Danspace Project, 100 Grand, Triskelion Arts, Irondale Center, and Dixon Place in NYC, as well as Detroit Opera House, Music Hall Performance Space (Detroit), Boll Theatre (Detroit), Iron Factory (Philadelphia), Fengchao Theatre (Beijing), and CMD has held creative residencies at Public Space One (Iowa City) and 555 Gallery (Detroit).

Masters has performed the work of Martha Clarke, Colleen Thomas, Stephanie Liapis, Keith Thompson, Doug Elkins, and Jan Erkert, among others. Additionally, Chris performed with Third Rail Projects' Then She Fell, recipient of a 2013 New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) Award. As an educator, Masters has served on the faculties of University of Michigan, Wayne State University, University of Iowa, Albion College, American College Dance Festival, Dance New Amsterdam, 100 Grand, Gibney Dance Center, Mark Morris Dance Center, and Peridance Capezio Center. Chris completed a MFA in Choreography from University of Iowa, where he was awarded an Iowa Arts Fellowship.

Ex-Fiancée/Sven Britt (Composer, Sound Designer, Cinematographer)

Sven Britt is the resident composer for ChrisMastersDance, completing scores for several works, including Mausoleum (BAM, 2023), A Feast That Never Comes (Film, 2022), Exit Strategies (Triskelion, 2014), Mausoleum (Work-In-Progress) (Danspace, 2014), and A Willful Host (La MaMa, 2014). His compositional work for dance has been shown at Iron Factory (Philadelphia), University of Iowa, University of Hawaii at Manoa, University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, and the Fengchao Theatre in Beijing (for an immersive dance theatre work created with CMD). He accompanies all dance classes taught by Chris Masters (among others), at Peridance Capezio Center, Mark Morris Dance Center, Gibney Dance Center, and University of Iowa.

He has played, produced, and toured professionally with Stranger Cat (Joyful Noise Recordings [Son Lux, Kishi Bashi, of Montreal]), a duo with Cat Martino (The Shins, Sufjan Stevens, Sharon van Etten), playing at Bonnaroo, as well as opening for Son Lux, Patrick Watson, Sebadoh, Natalie Prass, Night Beds, Indians, Emmy the Great, Yoni Wolf, Serengeti, Reptar, Surfer Blood, and Porches.

His upcoming album A Feast That Never Comes—directed by Chris Masters—is accompanied by a dance film that has received 700+ festival awards and selections in the most competitive festival season in history.