Performance explores art of secret keeping

Secrets are not usually shared, but one choreographer is using performance and multimedia to put them on display.

“Secrets I Never Told My Mother,” a dance performance exploring the sociology of secret-keeping, is showing today through Saturday in Durham. The performance is a collaboration between Leah Wilks, a choreographer, and Jon Haas, a video producer and UNC alumnus.

Wilks said the project began when she took an audio documentary class at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, where students had to put together a five-minute recorded project.

Wilks created a sound collage of peoples’ secrets they never told their mothers.

“Secrecy has been really harmful to the women in my family,” Wilks said. “It promotes this sort of desire to pretend that everything’s okay when maybe it’s not.”

Wilks said much of her work has to do with societal expectations about why people do what they do.

“The secrets (told in interviews) ranged from silly ones like ‘Dear mom, I never told you that I peed in the house plant,’” she said. “But there are also a lot of really serious ones.”

But with Wilks’ love of choreography and dance, she realized the project needed to be bigger.

Wilks and Haas, who met while working on another production in Memorial Hall, combined video and dance to explore the conversations that the secrets elicited.

Haas said a lot of the videos are home videos from dancers, archived videos and his own footage.

“What I’m doing with the video is a lot of collage work,” he said. “It’s kind of creating atmospheres or textures, rather than straight video.”

To combine the video projections, audio clips and dance, Haas is using a program that uses motion sensor and motion tracking, so dancers on stage can trigger video projection patterns with their movements and sounds.

Wilks said most of the video clips connect the secrets, focusing on taboo subjects like sex, drugs, love and family.

She said many of the dancers used personal secrets as inspiration for movements.

“If you think about having a secret, and it’s about to be told — for most people — you feel something in your chest or stomach,” Wilks said.

“So we think about movement that initiates from those places.”

The choreography was collaborative for Wilks, who said she chose her dancers because they are smart, engaged and creative.

Nicola Bullock, one of the five dancers in the show, said Wilks, a young choreographer, has worked with a lot of people to pull off this performance.

“She didn’t just deem herself in charge,” Bullock said. “She sourced tasks out to people who are actually professionals in their field.”

The production’s choreography and video footage are what make it stand out, Bullock said.

“Secrets are a huge source of power and shame,” she said. “And the movements used definitely reflect both of those things.”

Contact the desk editor at arts@dailytarheel.com.