Sticks
&
Stone
Sticks & Stone is both a show and an ongoing collaboration between interdisciplinary artists Nicki Miller and Benny Oyzon.
Since 2017 we’ve been weaving aerial dance and storytelling with counterweight rigging designs. We make our own work, and we collaborate with performance makers seeking to integrate aerial into their projects.
We’re curious about the continuum of human body to planetary body.
Through creative aerial rigging design and interdisciplinary practices, we investigate the ways in which we co-create our embodied relationships in response to the physical and conceptual structures that surround us.
The show titled Sticks & Stone is the culmination of artistic research Nicki & Benny explored between 2019-2022. This project uses elements of aerial dance, puppetry, physical theatre, and poetry as two characters confront the dissociation of mind and body perpetuated by ill-fitting identity constructs, social obligations, and cultural expectations. The show asks
what do we do when our bodies become strangers to our souls?
The poetry of physics…
… or the physics of poetry?
“According to quantum mechanics there is no such thing as objectivity. We cannot eliminate ourselves from the picture. We are a part of nature, and when we study nature there is no way around the fact that nature is studying itself. Physics has become a branch of psychology, or perhaps the other way around.” - Gary Zukov