Performance as moving geology

Leah Crosby & Danielle Doell make strange, tender, tectonic performances that shift the emotional ground under your feet.

LanDforms choreographers built the structure of a new performance based on recordings of their Chicken Road rounds

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.

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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.

Wander through the work ↘ Skip to performances

What they make

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.
  • Shared states: silly, brittle, joyous, exhausted, hopeful.

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.

choreographic oddities slow-burn humor tender disasters collective attention

What people feel

A rough, unscientific map of audience feelings

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.”

disorientation (gentle) emotional lag afterglow + questions

Where the work appears

Performances as temporary landforms

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.”
– Participant, informal feedback