Leah Crosby & Danielle Doell make
strange, tender, tectonic performances
that shift the emotional ground under your feet.
Landforms Dance is their shared terrain – part stage, part fault line, part comic
relief. The work is often funny, sometimes tragic, and always unusual enough to
surprise people into noticing what they are feeling.
Instead of treating performance as something that happens safely “over there”,
Leah and Danielle invite audiences into a landscape of mischief, vulnerability,
and meticulously crafted awkwardness. Scenes tip from ridiculous to devastating
and back again, without ever pausing to ask if those categories are supposed to
be kept separate. The result is a space where humor and heartbreak rub up against
each other until something honest appears.
Performances that slide between joke and confession
Leah Crosby and Danielle Doell build pieces the way rivers carve canyons:
slowly, playfully, and with a quiet respect for what the terrain refuses to do.
Each work is a map of almosts – almost a comedy sketch, almost a ritual,
almost a dance about nothing, almost too much.
Movement phrases tangle with text, props show up before they are fully explained,
and performers hover in the strange limbo between intentional choreography and
genuine surprise. Moments of deadpan humor are allowed to sit right next to
moments of unguarded emotion, without one cancelling out the other.
Unreliable narrators that still tell the truth from the side.
Choreography built from small social gestures and misfires.
Scenes that loop back until they become something else entirely.
The tone is less “watch this virtuosity” and more “stay with us while this
ridiculous, fragile thing tries to exist.” Audiences are not asked to decode
a secret; they are asked to notice what lands in their own body as the work unfolds.
If you tried to chart a typical Landforms Dance experience, the line might
wander like this:
Minute 3: “Is this… allowed to be this weird?”
Minute 9: Sudden recognition of a very specific social anxiety.
Minute 16: Laughing at something that feels a little too close.
Minute 24: A surprising ache in the chest that was not on the program.
Minute 31: Relief, because someone on stage breaks the tension in exactly the right wrong way.
The work does not prescribe what anyone should feel. Instead, it builds conditions
where feeling is more likely to happen – where the line between performer and
spectator blurs just enough that everyone is negotiating the same shifting ground.
People leave saying things like “I laughed a lot, but now I’m thinking about my
grandmother” or “I didn’t understand every part, but somehow I needed all of it.”
Each performance sits inside its own micro-climate: black box, found space,
community venue, improvised corner of the world. Leah and Danielle treat
every location as a collaborator – a surface to lean on, a doorway to misuse,
a hallway that can hold an echo longer than expected.
Sample evening arc
Opening
Soft Landing
A slow, awkward arrival. People find their seats while the performance
quietly insists it has already started.
Middle
Fault Line Duets
Two bodies negotiate a series of almost-collisions; the joke keeps
almost landing, the tears keep almost arriving.
After
Residuals
A quiet ending that leaves just enough unsaid for the lobby conversations
to become part of the piece.
Working with others
Collaboration as shared weirdness
Landforms Dance loves collaborators who bring their own tectonic plates to
the table: musicians, writers, visual artists, organizers, spaces that have
their own history. The work stretches in response, but it never entirely
smooths out its edges.
A typical collaboration might look like a workshop that starts with bad
jokes and ends with a room full of people lying on the floor, quietly
negotiating what it means to be present with each other.
The practical side: clear communication, shared values, and a willingness
to hold both logistics and big feelings in the same palm.
“It felt like rehearsal, therapy, and a very strange party, all at once.”