Deax Dea

What makes us human? That’s the central question animating DeaxDea, a playfully absurd evening-length dance piece. Drawing from Massimiliano Bontempelli’s 1925 absurdist play Nostra Dea, a landmark of early magical realism, the piece interrogates how identity, particularly feminine identity, is shaped, erased, and mythologized by external forces. 

In the original play, Dea, the protagonist transforms daily, her identity shifting with each new outfit her dressmaker gives her. In DeaxDea, this character becomes a prism through which four performers explore the roles women are expected to inhabit, roles that are too tight and impossibly amorphous. Nelson and Orchin reimagine Dea as both a vessel and a disrupter: a memoryless force navigating the chaos of identity, submitting and resisting in equal measure.

Through moments of whimsical play and stark disruption, the dancers expose the cyclical nature of history, the amnesia of progress, and the absurd expectations still imposed on women today.

This iteration culminates years of development, from solos to duets to ensemble works. 

Now distilled into its purest form, DeaxDea embraces contradiction, movement, and metamorphosis; demanding we ask not just who Dea is, but who are we becoming.