MEET THE ARTISTS
ON SECOND THOUGHT
CREATIVE DIRECTOR & CHOREOGRAPHER
BRET EASTERLING
is a multidisciplinary artist, director, and educator creating performance, film, and community-based projects that use movement as a tool for connection, inquiry, and collective experience. He received his BFA and the Hector Zaraspe Prize for Choreography from The Juilliard School, and became a formative member of Gallim Dance and a prominent performer and creative contributor with Ohad Naharin’s internationally renowned Batsheva Dance Company.
Easterling has created and presented work across live performance and interdisciplinary platforms at institutions including Jacob’s Pillow, Lincoln Center, REDCAT, 92NY, Opera Philadelphia, LA Dance Project, AMOC* (American Modern Opera Company), Whim W’Him, Backhausdance, b12, Dance Camera West, Dance on Camera Festival, and Hauser & Wirth. His collaborative practice includes projects with Anthony Roth Costanzo, Kesha, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, and Jurassic Spine. He also maintains an artistic partnership with Julia Eichten as EICHTERLING, spanning choreography, curation, film, and fashion.
As Founder and Artistic Director of the LGBTQ+ nonprofit BEMOVING, Easterling builds infrastructure supporting the creation, presentation, and sustainability of dance. He is on faculty at the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, co-director of Ghost Light Residency, co-founder of PAY DANCERS, and an Ilan Lev Method practitioner, grounding his work in care for artists.
CAST & CONTRIBUTORS
COLLABORATORS
RS BUCK
RS Buck in a Los Angeles-based international producer, designer, and manager for live experiences. Their work focuses on creating safe-spaces for whimsical satisfaction. Design Credits: For IHP: The Water Saga (Production Manager, West Palm Beach 2020); Exodus: Resettlement (Lighting Designer, Omaha 2019); The Sarah Play (Lighting Designer, Kansas City 2017). International: Brecht (Be Moving, Israel); Cages (Woolf and the Wondershow); Orpheé (Deaf West, Japan, postponed 2020); Ínsula (The Useless Room, India, postponed 2020); Antigone (Yin Mei Dance, China), ¡Anarchist! (Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern, Mexico). LA: Canyon (Kirk Douglas Theater); Buyer and Cellar (Celebration Theatre); Orphée (Deaf West), The Conference of the Birds; The Moon has Made us Brothers (The Resonance Collective), Anyone But Me, The Oxy Complex, Mama Metal (IAMA Theatre Company), herd; Most Famous Mixtape (BODYART Dance), After it Happened (Invertigo Dance Theatre), Machines and Strings (Isaura Quartet). Producing and Management Credits: Touring: CalArts Expo 2018-2023; The Latrell Show (IAMA Theatre Company); Formulae and Fairy Tales (Invertigo Dance Theatre); The Conference of the Birds (The Resonance Collective); MASS (Milka Djordjevich Dance); Near Vicksburg; Mickey and Sage (Foxy Films). They hold their MFA in Experience Design and Production from California Institute of the Arts.
LIGHTING DESIGN
WYATT CODAY
Wyatt Coday is intersex and autistic. Coday describes her practice as “research performance” and offers her labor as a “unique instance of Black melancholy.” Her work spans legal interventions, essays and contemporary folk tales, unorthodox disability accommodations, lecture-performances, and photography.
In 2020, Coday was named as a columnist-in-residence at Open Space, SFMOMA's online writing platform. In 2021, Coday received an emerging artist grant from the California Arts Council and published 4 INSTRUMENTS, an excerpt from her in-progress novella, with Apogee Graphics. Nightboat Books anthologized another excerpt in WE WANT IT ALL: AN ANTHOLOGY OF RADICAL TRANS POETICS (2021). In 2023, Dirt published RESEARCH, a third installment of the novella. Her writing has appeared in Into, The Avery Review, X-TRA, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
As NOR RESEARCH STUDIO, the design research studio she founded in 2017 with Evan Kleekamp (1992-2022), Coday develops didactic media, exhibitions, publications, and other forms of intellectual property for artists, nonprofits, and creative businesses.
DRAMATURG & ARCHIVIST
SOUND DESIGNMAXWELL TRANSUE
Maxwell Transue is an international composer and sound designer specializing in making immersive, thematic music and sound by weaving together layers of organic and synthetic elements, complex rhythms, and atmospheric textures. As the founder of Verdant Sound Records, Maxwell has extensive experience as a composer and sound designer for film, live theater, dance, marketing content, and recording artists, winning several awards for original scores including First Place and Audience Choice awards at international dance film festivals.
His music is currently being used in works by dance choreographers and filmmakers Bret Easterling, Jermaine Spivey, Spenser Theberge, Robert Bruce Hope, and The Kusanagi Sisters. As an independent artist Maxwell has performed alongside major artists such as Slow Magic, Low Leaf, Goodnight Cody, and Monster Rally. Maxwell is on staff at the Glorya Kaufman School of Dance as the lead accompanist and currently touring a new original work "BRECHT" in collaboration with Bret Easterling.