Embedded Files
THIS PLACE, COULD BE (2024)
Co-Choreographed by Anna Jayne Kimmel and Leo Hylton
Leo Hylton helps organizational leaders build deeper trust, accountability, and community within their teams and trains them to design and implement conflict transformation pathways from a restorative justice ethos. He is a PhD student at the Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, leading healing-centered research at the Mary Hoch Center for Reconciliation. Leo is currently incarcerated in Maine State Prison. His education and work are based in trauma-informed, healing-centered Restorative Justice (RJ) practices, with a vision toward an abolitionist future.
He has worked with Think Peace as a Restorative Justice Consultant in support of transitional justice work, toward truth telling, racial healing, and reconciliation and was a Visiting Instructor at Colby College, co-teaching “Carcerality and Abolition.” He was a lead facilitator of Maine State Prison’s Restorative Practices Steering Committee, served on Colby College’s Restorative Practices Team, and provides consultation to RJ practitioners in the US and abroad. Leo is a core organizer of the Carter School Working Group on Forgiveness and Reconciliation, creating spaces of co-learning, growth, and trauma healing in the context of forgiveness and reconciliation. He is also a columnist for The Bollard (formerly Mainer), where he writes a monthly column called Shining Light on Humanity.
REND (2024)
Stitching together testimonies from death row, REND amplifies the interconnected stakes of mental health, boyhood, and masculinity. The play continues a larger project of Kenneth’s Reams' to interrogate the ethics, impact, and legacy of U.S. capital punishment through artistic and aesthetic intervention. Coordinated in affinity with the 22nd Annual World Day Against the Death Penalty, REND will be followed with a discussion among a panel of artists, activists, and academics, including representation from Voices Unbarred.
This work engaged stakeholders across George Washington University and the wider DC community, with artistic support from national collaborators in sound, film, and multi-media. This includes undergraduate and graduate students; students from GWU and Howard University; faculty engagement from American Studies, Program in Writing, and Theatre and Dance; community engagement from Voices Unbarred.
Impact included the development of a university seminar series, “Carceral Renderings: Interdisciplinary Attentions to Death Row,” development of an independent study on themes of audience engagement and arts impact, a visual arts exhibition featuring work by Kenneth Reams and curated by Museum Studies students, participation with formerly incarcerated and non-incarcerated artists and stakeholders, an interdisciplinary panel, and documentary film footage as Reams continues to advocate for his freedom.
This event was free to the public, and welcomed over 70 in audience attendance.
SOLI (2020)
An evening-length performance on capital punishment in the US in collaboration with Kenneth Reams
Nitery Theater, Stanford University. February 6-8, 2020
SOLI is a dance created in collaboration with Kenneth Reams—an artist, activist, and inmate on death row. This piece oscillates between themes of solitude and solidarity to offer space for reflection regarding the injustices of the American criminal justice system and the continued practice of capital punishment. Centered around Reams' inability to be in attendance for this labor of mutual respect, admiration, and ideas, this dance explores the limits of presence for the absent body, and the vulnerability of invisibility.
This performance was reviewed by students of Professor Janice Ross's course, Introduction to Dance Studies, at Stanford University.
CHOREOGRAPHER: Anna Jayne Kimmel, in collaboration with:
PERFORMERS: Olivia Higa, Celeste Jupiter, Margot Kaiser, Justine Kaneda, Meg McNulty, Olivia Mitchel, Brianna Peet, Grace Scullion, Dylan Sherman, Eli Shi, Lian Stemler
COMPOSER: Barbara Nerness
THE NEW ENSEMBLE: Hans Kretz (Director, Piano), Michele Cheng (Keyboard, Percussion),
Nicolle Hendzel (Voice), Mahnaz Roshanaie (Santoor), Michael Svolos (Flute), Eddie Tchaouchev
(Double Bass), Michiko Theurer (Violin), Colin Yule (Percussion)
LIGHTING DESIGNER: Kathleen Feng
SPONSORS: Stanford University's Department of Theater and Performance Studies, Department of Music, Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, and the non-profit organization, WhoDecides,Inc. Photographs by Michael Spencer and Frank Chen.
Walking Histories: Race and Protest at Princeton and Trenton (2019, 2017)
Debuted October 6-8, 2017. Re-staged May 30-June 1, 2019.
"Back by popular demand, this series of performance walks through the Princeton University campus, created by theater artist Aaron Landsman and historian Alison Isenberg in collaboration with Princeton students, examines how issues of race and protest, in Trenton and on campus, are imprinted on Princeton’s buildings and grounds."
Written and Dramaturged by Kyle Berlin and Anna Kimmel, both Class of 2018
Performed by Kyle Berlin and Milan Eldridge '20.
Sponsored by the Princeton Mellon Initiative: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities.
Reviewed in the Daily Princetonian and The Princeton Comment.
Self-Evident (2017)
1337 words. 57 signatures. 1 truth? An immersive performance of the Declaration of Independence
Saturate (2017)
A digital installation and intervention.
Presented at Performance Lab, Princeton University, April 2017
Restaged at Lewis Center for the Arts Opening Festival. October, 2017
Co-choreographed and Performed with Jessica Chambers
Media Technology by Helen Lin
As reviewed in Nassau Weekly: "Saturate features a film of two nude dancers, Kimmel and Jessica Chambers. The sole object on stage is a wooden box covered in smartphones, with a microphone placed among them to capture the rings and vibrations produced by the
phones...creating an eerily beautiful cacophony...Saturate conveys the ubiquitous presence of technology and the discord it creates by giving technology a voice in the form of rings and buzzes."
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