Hand to Mouth is a non•disciplinary company of sentient and inanimate collaborators invested in the labor of survival. Founded by visual artist Deville Cohen during the COVID-19 pandemic. It integrates Cohen’s studio and performance practices through a process of collaboration (remotely and in-person) with other artists and institutions. Objects and gadgets are not just instruments or props in the work. They are equal partners, inanimate collaborators, forming a coalition with human performers.
Hand to mouth to
Hand to mouth to
Deville Cohen (founder & artistic director)
* 1977 is a New York City based visual artist and a director. He studied sculpture at the KHB Berlin from 2002-2007 and received his MFA in film/video from Bard College NY in 2010. His videos and installations were shown internationally in museums and galleries such as MoMA PS1; SFMoMA; The CCA Tel-Aviv; and The Living Art Museum, Reykjavik. He began creating for the stage during a residency at the Wooster Group Performance Garage in the summer of 2014. His creation underline in collaboration with the composer Hugo Morales was commissioned and co-produced by the Deutsche Oper Berlin and The Munich Biennale for New Music Theater in 2016. In 2018 he co-created MENAGERIE with choreographer Shamel Pitts for Gibney Dance Company in NYC. In 2019 his new creation McGuffin was commissioned and produced by The Center of The Less Good Idea in Johannesburg, South Africa. He was an artist in residence at Recess Art; EMPAC Troy, NY; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) workspace, NYC; Fountainhead in Miami; and LMCC Process-Space NYC. www.devillecohen.art
Tushrik Fredrick (sentient collaborator)
* 1995 is originally from Johannesburg, South Africa and is currently based in NYC. He was mostly trained in Hip Hop dancing and specifically found himself drawn towards the style ‘KRUMP’ growing up. He graduated from the Peridance Capezio Center Certificate Program in NYC in June 2015 where he received most of his formal training. He has had the opportunity to work with Ate9 dANCEcOMPANY (Danielle Agami, Artistic Director) and Sidra Bell Dance New York from July 2015 - June 2018. He is now working with Shamel Pitts as well as freelancing. Tushrik was an assistant lecturer to Sidra Bell at The University of the Arts Philadelphia for Sophomore students(2016-2018).
Margaux Marielle-Tréhoüart
(sentient collaborator)
* in Paris in 1991 is a freelance dancer based in Berlin. She studied dance and drama at the Conservatoire de Grenoble, France, and the Folkwang Universität der Künste in Essen. She dances with Sasha Waltz & guests since 2013. She worked as well under the direction of Claudia Castellucci/Socìetas Raffaello Sanzo, Pierre Audi, Saar Magal, Elik Niv, Régis Obadia, Fabian Gerhardt, Luis Malvacias, Deborah Hay, Andrew Schneider. Her regular collaborations are choreographers Simon Tanguy and Naïma Mazic, directors Muriel Vernet and Deville Cohen, ensemble Opera Lab Berlin and musician Haggai Cohen-Milo. This year she starts working with choreographer Stephanie Thiersch, and will perform for director Marta Gornicka at the Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin.
Laura K. Nicoll
(sentient collaborator)
* 1983 is a choreographer / performer who splits her time between Maine and Brooklyn, NY. She is a classically trained dancer who often creates outdoor performances, in public space, or non-traditional dance venues as well as short films for social media and the internet at large. Recent experience includes collaborations with theater director / new media designer Reid Farrington (NYC: The Tank, HERE Arts, Abrons Arts Center, 3LD Art & Technology Center), choreographer / dancer Jessica Nicoll (NYC: Estrogenius Festival, CPR’s Spring Movement Festival), and writer / performer Rufus Morgan Kreilkamp Nicoll (Maine: Maine Moves). Residencies + grants include: Harbor Residency at Opera House Arts, Bates Dance Festival, Mertz Gilmore Foundation Late Stage Creative Stipend via Union Street Dance. Laura was a member of Pittsburgh Ballet Theater’s corps de ballet from 2001–2006 where she was also a union representative. She also performed on the Norwegian Dawn, a cruise ship!
Hand to Mouth, as a project and as a company materialized from a personal state of disillusionment and frustration. The fictional sense of crisis I was operating from was a projection of my desire for a utopian functionally within a failed system. Not feeling integrated or coherent generated a necessity to decondition myself of its mechanisms in order to reinvent my understanding of being outside of it. Desire and longing render themselves almost as survival strategies for a condition of immense needs.
April 2020, NYC: Week five of self-quarantine under COVID-19, the world outside temporarily fits its behaviors to my dysfunctional projection of it. We are only going to get more lonely, more horny, and even more broke during this pandemic.
June 2020: While still in lockdown we are confronted by ongoing police brutality, racism, and injustice, their overt violence, and our complicity in their existence.
As a group of individuals faced with global uncertainty and forced into our respective personal spaces, we resort to dystopic optimism as we commit to the trouble of vulnerability in our attitudes and practices. Maintaining intimacy, not losing touch, and sharing of resources feels like the right values to focus our care on in preparation for whatever version of reality is awaiting us.
The props, set design, movement materials, and videos in Hand to Mouth — informed by architectural models, collage, and jigsaw puzzles — acknowledge the cutout and its negative shapes as positive architectural economies of consumption and refuse. In this jigsaw-puzzled world, the violent acts of dissecting bodies and environments, and the contrasting care of assembling in the collage process serve as the range for the first of the project’s workshops. Can we, as compartmentalized individuals in a fragmented ruined landscape, locate a newly formed incorporated body that has the ability to reverse the limited direction of consumption into a manifesting power of possibilities to interact with, within, and without.
August 3, 2020: Hand to Mouth is taking its provisional nonexistence into an even more virtual space. Until we can all touch the same prop and share physical space with a live audience, welcome to our temporary. For the time being this website will serve as our open studio; a platform to share publicly the vulnerability and intimacy of our process. Launching on the full moon of August 3 we are keeping with this cosmic period. For the next 9 moons we will workshop one notion each month and will update every 28 days via newsletters that distill the process’s outcomes: new experiments, actions, and propositions. To join our orbit and sign up for our lunar calendar click moon.