How We Are Two

Concept: Nichele Van Portfleet & Chang Liu 

Choreography & Performance: Nichele Van Portfleet & Chang Liu 

Installation: Nichele Van Portfleet & Chang Liu 

Sound & Prop: Nichele Van Portfleet & Chang Liu

Videography: Nichele Van Portfleet & Chang Liu 

Documentation: Benjamin Sandberg 

Tech Support & 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.