At the age of 6, Thayer emigrated from Tokyo, Japan to Brooklyn, NY. She has since lived with a dual sense of identity: internally Japanese and externally a funky, who-knows-what Brooklynite.
Her Japanese-American identity inspired her to examine the impact that culture has on our bodies; how the swirling alchemy of physical and social forces influences the ways we move through the world. In this piece, audience members moved through Northrop at the U of MN’s backstage spaces, among the dancers.
All Hail the Queen examines the historically censored anatomies of women, specifically the voice and the vagina. All Hail the Queen is a dance installation—an immersive environment through which the audience travels to experience shifting cultural, historical, and somatic perspectives on “the female body.” All Hail the Queen counters the devaluation and dismissal of women’s bodies with celebratory, artistic energy.
Engulfed in a surreal, frozen landscape, “Antarctica” uses movement and sound to provoke meditative states and explore how the extreme cold can evoke a sense of isolation. With the sense of glacial time as inspiration, the piece oscillates between flow and stillness.
Diana is a “swim” into the female collective unconscious and strives to provoke ‘altered states of being’ in both the performer and audience. The 30-ft dress functions as Diana’s apparatus to shapeshift through various feminine characters and archetypes.
By choosing how her body is hidden or revealed, Diana questions who has the power of gaze: Is it her? The observer? And as she watches the observer(s) watching her, does this power shift?
Ode to Dolly, the sheep, inter alia is about cloning and the human tendency to create things in the likeness of ourselves and becoming all tangled up and confused in the process. Elastics and artificial baby parts stretch to create geometric grids, tangled canopies, and sculpturesque forms. This work explores our instinctual reproductive behaviors, interfacing with artificial ideas of creation.