Moss and Other Things Program
Esmé Boyce Dance
Moss and Other Things
Choreography + Direction by Esmé Julien Boyce, made in collaboration with the dance artists
Dance Performance by Esmé Julien Boyce, Ching-I Chang, Caroline Fermin, Pierre Guilbault, and Cori Kresge
Musical Performance by Jean-Paul Björlin, Sophie Daws, Brian Ellis, Samantha Goldman, Hope Littwin, London Lucille, John Urban (Synths), Hannah Wilson
Music Composition by Cody Boyce, Dreamt Dreamer, Eleanor Hovda, and Hope Littwin
Costume Design by Sue Julien and Esmé Boyce in collaboration with the dance artists
Set Design by Kit Boyce
Special thank you to Gentry Isaiah George and Matilda Sakamoto for their fabulous contribution to the making of this piece. Thank you to my parents, Kit Boyce and Sue Julien for their ongoing support and producing this work and to Arts on Site for having us!
Moss and Other Things is a piece about the coexistence of conflicting experiences. It is about the joy of your child laughing and the simultaneous grief of a loved one lost; going to the park on a perfect afternoon knowing war is ravaging families across oceans; humor and rage bubbling up next to each other. It explores the moments of transcendence in which we move between the everyday and the vast unknown. This work pulls its aesthetic language from a recent trip to Iceland where we wandered lava fields in which soft vibrant moss grew on the hardened, cooled, molten core of the earth, the calm evidence of the Earth’s explosive power.
This piece is dedicated in loving memory to Rubén Travieso, my father-in-law, Lorna Domínguez, Kyle Richardson’s mama and Cesár Fermin, Caroline Fermin’s papa. They are deeply beloved and missed beyond any words.
Bios:
Jean-Paul Björlin is a singer, pianist, and hornist working in New York City, and originally from Sweden. He teaches classical, popular, and world music at Barnard College. He is a Music Director and Voice Teacher to actors and musical theater students at Circle in the Square Theater School. As Guest Faculty, he has also taught at University of South Carolina in Columbia, SC and Manhattan School of Music. In the summers of 2008-2016, Jean-Paul worked as a pianist and vocal coach at the voice program of Marlena Malas at the Chautauqua Institution. Two favorite memories are co-teaching students a recital of Swedish art songs with Margo Garrett at The Juilliard School and with Craig Rutenberg at Chautauqua. He joined the faculty of Summer Performing Arts with Juilliard in 2017. He attended high school at Interlochen Arts Academy as a hornist, pianist, and singer. He completed his Bachelor of Music and Master of Music degrees at The Juilliard School, studying voice.
Cody Boyce is an artist and musician based in Queens, NY. He has composed for dance, film and installation, including collaborations with his sister, choreographer Esmé Boyce; filmmakers Joseph Barglowski, Robert Orlowski, Miriam Gabriel and Sophia de Baun; and artists Matthew Schreiber, Osvald Landmark and Ryan Hartley Smith. He makes improvised music as one half of the duo Dreamt Dreamer, with Matti Weisberg. Boyce received a BFA in visual art from Cooper Union in 2012, and an MFA in Sonic Arts from Brooklyn College in 2020.
Esmé Julien Boyce is a New York City based choreographer and dancer. Boyce was a fall 2023 BAC Open artist in residence at Baryshnikov Arts. She has presented her work at 92nd Street Y, Dixon Place, Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Judson Church, Baryshnikov Arts, Center for Performance Research and Arts on Site. Boyce’s work was curated for the Judson Church performances of the Museum of Modern Art’s fall 2018 exhibition, Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done. Boyce was a 2016-2017 New Direction Choreography Lab Fellow at The Ailey School and returned to The Ailey School to choreograph for the 2018 BFA Fall Concert. Boyce has also been in residence at Chen Dance Center’s New Steps and The Visionary in Mount Tremper, New York. Boyce holds a BFA in dance from The Juilliard School and an MFA in dance from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Kit Boyce, set designer, is a Bronx-based visual artist. He holds a BFA in Art from Carnegie Mellon University and a MFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Ching-I Chang A migrating breeze, made in Taiwan, U.S.‑naturalized dance artist. She explores the voices of the peripheral and subaltern. Her interdisciplinary work has appeared at Yuz Museum, Queens Museum, MOCA, ICA at VCU, Harlem Stage, Danspace DraftWork, and Movement Research at Judson Church. She has worked with Susan Marshall and Gesel Mason, performed in Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More (NYC original cast; Shanghai performer & rehearsal director), and toured with ANIKAYA to Palestine, India, Pakistan and across Africa. Ching-I holds an MFA from the U of Utah and certifications in Laban/Bartenieff, Yoga and Yoga Nidra. She facilitates the Inter‑grant Festival. In 2025, she is an Individual Artist Finalist (NJ State Council on the Arts), a Create Change Fellow (The Laundromat Project), and a 2024-2025 AAPI resident artist at TOPAZ ARTS. Ching‑I loves bananas.
Sophie Daws (she/her) is a poet and improvisational vocalist from the Sonoran desert now living in Brooklyn. Daws problematizes the quest for a spiritual and poetic life in the midst of hyper-consumerism and late capitalism in her performance art and poetry through meta-irony, sarcasm, and a mercurial restlessness. She has performed in her noise duo, New Mom (with Greg Saunier from Deerhoof), and as a poet at galleries and venue spaces across the U.S., is a recipient of the Hattie Lockett Award, and has work in the Medium. Daws is also an arts educator, arts community organizer, and activist.
Brian Ellis is a creative coder, composer, and multi-instrumentalist. His artistic drive lies in using code to democratize creative expression. He founded the Brooklyn Motion Capture Dance Ensemble to explore this concept through the medium of dance, writes participatory chamber music to explore it through concert music settings, and develops open source tools to enable others to create similar work. Brian maintains many performance practices, incorporating classical guitar, mountain dulcimer, live electronics, and no-input-mixing. He also built and maintains motion-into-midi.com, an open-source tool that lets anyone do motion capture with just their laptop.
Caroline Fermin is a choreographer, performer, and educator based in New York. Her work integrates community engagement practice and the concepts of empathy and play. Most recently she choreographed for Target Margin Theater’s production of Show/Boat: A River at NYU Skirball. She is a founding member of Gallim Dance which performed and toured nationally and internationally, and also served as the company's education chair and rehearsal director. Caroline graduated from The Juilliard School (BFA) and Wilson College (MFA). She is a term lecturer at Barnard College and an adjunct at Marymount Manhattan College where she teaches contemporary dance and improvisation.
Samantha “Shemona” Goldman, also known as Ariel Gold, is a Toronto-based singer, cellist, sculptor, and producer. Trained in vocal performance with Fides Krucker and holding an MFA in Music/Sound from Bard College, their practice spans experimental voice and hand-built analog sound sculptures. They have performed at the opening of Yoko Ono’s The Riverbed and at the Art Gallery of Ontario, using sound and material resonance to explore belonging and embodied connection.
New York–based Canadian-American Pierre Guilbault walks a path that bridges technology and creativity. A professional dancer who now also writes software for JPMorgan Chase, he is a devoted father, fiancé, and dog owner who loves life within a close-knit family. Before transitioning to tech, Pierre danced in France with Robert Swinston at CNDC Angers, performing works from the Merce Cunningham repertory—an experience that shaped his precision, discipline, and collaborative mindset. A certified WSET Level 2 graduate, he continues to explore wine deeply, studying production, terroir, and the sensory art of tasting.
Sue Julien is a visual artist and costumer. She has created costumes for Esmé Boyce Dance, Cori Kresge, Yara Travieso, Douglas Dunn and Dancers, Catherine Tharin Dance, Janis Brenner & Dancers and the singer Grace Weber. Ms. Julien received a BFA in Painting from Carnegie Mellon University and a MFA in Painting from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her artwork has been exhibited in galleries in Brooklyn and Chicago as well as Brown University, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for an Individual Artist, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship for an Individual Artist. www.suejulien.com
Cori Kresge is a NYC based dance artist, licensed massage therapist, writer, and teacher. She has been a member of José Navas/Compagnie Flak, Stephen Petronio Company, the Merce Cunningham Repertory Understudy Group, and is an authorized teacher of Cunningham technique. She currently collaborates and performs with various artists including Rashaun Mitchell+Silas Riener, Liz Magic Laser, Rebecca Lazier, Sarah Skaggs, Wendy Osserman, and Esmé Boyce. She is the author of two poetry collections, isn’t devotion (No, Dear/Small Anchor first chapbook prize, 2019) and Combustion Suite (Bored Wolves, 2023). In 2020 she founded Play With Matches Workshop, pairing artists of different disciplines together to co-mentor one another
American Composer and Music Producer Hope Littwin grew up in dance and theater before she took to music, first as a singer-songwriter then as a classical singer and now as a composer and music producer. She loves to collaborate with artists of all kinds on embodied, expressive works. Hope’s compositions fuse Chamber Music, Vocal Music, Electronics, Choreography and Storytelling. She has been commissioned by Choirs, Chamber Ensembles, Theater and Dance companies to lead the creation of original works that pull from the idiosyncratic desires and abilities of the ensembles that she is engaged with. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Music Composition at Princeton University. The Daily Princetonian says Hope Littwin's music explores the “euphoric realm, where the physicality of musical expression is fully embraced — where music is not only something we do, but something we are.” Hope’s original works are available for streaming on band camp and YouTube, her Albums (can be found on Spotify/iTunes. Find Hope on instagram @hopelittwin
Adrian Pobric is an arts administrator. She has worked in galleries, museums, art-tech and most significantly, as a manager of private art collections. She lives in the Bronx with her husband and two sons.
John Urban grew up playing gospel piano in the Baptist tradition. After getting expelled from seminary, he got two degrees in classical piano. After years of travel he ended up here in New York City, where he's lived for eight years. It was here that he first became interested in synthesis. He lives off of poetry and the stories strangers tell.
Matti Weisberg is a sound artist based in Holyoke, MA. They combine their training in biostatistics, theology, aesthetics and social justice to approach sound as a living body that absorbs space and entangles its inhabitants. The result is an ecosystem of practices which, through a lens of transness, seeks to find beautiful homologies between the socially contingent experience of selfhood and the relational behavior of matter itself. Their practice takes many forms including building singing sculptures, composing hybrid text/graphic/notated scores for small ensembles, authoring illustrated allegories, arranging original baroque pop music, designing a gestural controller for improvised trumpet performance, and creating electroacoustic work for multichannel playback. Originally from New Rochelle, NY they received a B.S. in Computational Biology from Brown University and an M.F.A. in Sonic Arts from Brooklyn College.
Hannah Wilson is a lifelong lover of artistic performance in all its forms. A Princeton graduate (2011) with a minor in theater, she served as Music Director of her a cappella group and was deeply involved in campus productions both onstage and behind the scenes. Hannah holds an MBA and a Master’s in Public Health, blending artistry and leadership in her work and community. She remains passionate about artistic collaboration and finds ongoing inspiration in the shared experience of making live art.
