Em Papineau is a dance artist, jock, and musician whose current movement research examines the intersections of queerness, intimacy, and trauma through contemporary and improvisation practices. Em has been in works by Chris Aiken, Danté Brown, David Dorfman, Doug Varone and Dancers, Alex Springer and Xan Burley, and Shakia Johnson. Em is also engaged in an ongoing collaboration with Sofia Engelman:Em Papineau and Sofia Engelman are dance artists based in New England. Their first collaborative work, Where the air is light and clear, was presented at the National College Dance Festival at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Together, Em and Sofia have held artistic residencies at The Living Room (Maine) and Ponderosa (Germany) and performed in work by Michael Figueroa/Ruckus Dance, David Dorfman, and Chris Aiken. The pair have performed iterations of their most recent project, INSTANT SAVIORS (just add water), at Movement Research at the Judson Church, FRESH Festival, EstroGenius at Kraine Theater, HUT at the School for Contemporary Dance and Thought, and AS220's Providence Movement Festival.from Em and Sofia on their collaboration:At the heart of our work is our queer relationship. Our relationship manifests not as a narrative so much as a feeling, a state of being, a world, and a logic. Our work creates and requires a particular state of togetherness through active negotiation, hopeless dependency, and acts of trust and survival. We shape unstable, intimate places through re-orientation and disorientation of the body, images, words, and objects. We love serious messes and treat every object we introduce into process and performance as essential, integrated, autonomous entities. We make space for effort and oddities. We are interested in humor, but not in making a joke of ourselves. We create structures and systems and then deconstruct or abandon them; we engage in a practice of world making and world reinvention.
