
Choreography & Performance: Nichele Van Portfleet & Chang Liu (Leo)
Installation: Nichele Van Portfleet & Chang Liu (Leo)
Stage & Sound Design: Nichele Van Portfleet & Chang Liu (Leo)
Videography: Chang Liu (Leo)
Costume: Nichele Van Portfleet
Documentation: Benjamin Sandberg
Instruction: Brent Schneider
Produced in 2016
Premiered at School of Dance, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, US
Concept:
how we are two is an interdisciplinary installation-performance that investigates flexuous binary relationships—masculine and feminine, queerness and normativity, West and East, white and non-white, organicity and manufacture, innocence and corruption, wholeness and wound.
Set in the architectural verticality of a stairwell, the piece unfolds on the ground floor, inviting the audience to witness from above, evoking both surveillance and contemplation. A projected video acts as both an omnipresent force—hand, power, manipulation—and as a shifting canvas for live choreography. At times, it is a shadow, a witness, a stage. Wind chimes suspended in the space transform the dancers’ movements into subtle echoes that resonate across floors, threading sound, body, and environment together.
The work asks:
How do we become in relation to another?
How do we belong, resist, transform, and reimagine ourselves within systems that divide?
how we are two is a meditation on coexistence, duality, and the possibility of rebirth through embodied dialogue


2016
how we are two
performance art + installation art / dance + choreography
Salt Lake City, US