Performances
The Performance Work of Body Research
… fascinating; awkward, tender, and violent movement combined with snippets of dialog and swiftly built-up characters and relationships, creating social and sexual conflicts with an almost unnerving intimacy… utterly compelling. BRETT FETZER, The Stranger (Seattle April 2004) {about Ashes}
… extremely interesting. I highly recommend it. ANNIE WAGNER, The Stranger (Seattle October 2004) {about Axolotl}
I left the theater shell-shocked. It was easily the oddest, most surprising performance experience I’ve ever had. And, against all expectations, one of the most rewarding. BRENDAN KILEY, The Stranger (Seattle October 2005) {about Axolotl}
…something startling and strangely beautiful to behold. MOLLY RHODES, SF Weekly (August 2007) {about Proximity}
… absolutely beautiful … incredibly powerful … I felt I was truly able to connect with the performance and become swept up in what I was watching. Anneta Konstantinides, THE AGGIE (Davis 2011) {about Body of Knowledge}
Recent Performances …
Axolotl –
aparticipatory performance work in which the audience is blindfolded for 2 hours and invited to interact and explore with each other and a group of actors dancers and musicians searching after the nature of meaningful experience (2004-2011)
an interactive performance work exploring how awareness and feeling live in our bodies, how knowledge of and debate on environmental issues and political issues exist alongside personal and private realities. (2011)
(Karl Frost’s MFA thesis work at UC Davis)
a work blending proscenium dance/theater performance with opportunities offered for audience involvement, exploring the self and the beauty, awkwardness, and darkness of human interconnection. As part of the work, audience members choose from various levels of involvement from traditional “audience as witness” to less mediated interaction with performers and other audience members. (2007)
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other recent performance projects
Close Quarters –Intimate performance of the juxtaposition of movement interaction based in calm, abstract kinesthetic experience with physical relationships formed by the emotional responses to somatic-psychotherapeutic studies. Multiple rooms of action with the audience wandering the rooms to view the scenes, constructing their own experience by following their curiosity. (2007)
Streams — a formal exploration of the distilled possibilities of the exploration of touch: kinesthetic, meditative, explosive, emotional. the audience chooses to either watch the performers interact with each other in duets or offer themselves for more experiential experiments of interaction with performers. a sequence of short movement meditations with audience/performer slam dancing in the middle. (2009)
Ashes — somatic-psychological studies in physical theater and release-based dance and partnering
Dancing Wilderness Project — an ongoing investigation into the interrelationships amongst wilderness experience, body-based creative process and how we choose to live our lives. (1997 to present)
Improvisations — since 1987, Karl Frost has been devoted to improvisation as performance, both as formal performance of improvisation as art form and to the performing of informal compositional studies, where the aim is to share the research and investigations of mind and awareness. His first evening length solo improvisation was Ulysses, performed in Vienna and San Francisco in 1998.
Click here for a listing of some performance reviews…