Livia Chesley
Theatre & Performance Art
Livia Chesley
Artist Bio
Livia Chesley is an actor, dancer, and creator of original performances who develops works through improvisation, long-term, multidisciplinary research, and daily training practices. Their current work, “Cacamwri” (working title), unsubstantiates the authority of inherited belief by reveling in the ephemeral and disrupting expectations. Livia’s work savors the ambiguous, the mysterious, the rhythmic, and the mercurial. They studied physical theatre with Roberta Carreri of Odin Teatret and Double Edge Theatre in Ashfield, Massachusetts, Butoh with Atsushi Takenouchi, clown with Avner the Eccentric, and modern dance with Sara Shelton Mann. Their work has been seen in Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, Wisconsin, Asheville, Chicago, Berlin, and most recently in Detroit as a collaborator and performer in The Hinterlands’ 2022 devised performance, “Will You Miss Me?”
Curriculum Vitae
2019 - present
Choreographer's Launch Pad Residency
June 2023, The Yard, Chilmark, MA
Performer/Collaborator with choreographer David Guzman & collaborator Carolina Torres
A plant walk, outdoor performance, and lichen talk held on the Wampanoag land where The Yard housed us for a two-week process of greeting and getting to know the land, the stories held there, and learning how to shift our perspectives away from anthropocentrism through a practice of "witnessing and being witnessed."
Will You Miss Me?
The Hinterlands, Dirs. Liza Bielby & Richard Newman, with collaborator Jenna Kirk
2022, Detroit, MI; Ashfield, MA
Performer/Collaborator
An outdoor touring performance in which four attendees commemorate the life of an Appalachian migrant who left everything behind to work in a Detroit automobile factory. We repeat the funeral over and over again trying to bury the body. The performance is woven through with songs from Appalachia and rituals of conjuring and answering to our ancestors.
Recipe Box, Memory Box
The Hinterlands, Dirs. Liza Bielby & Richard Newman, with collaborator Jenna Kirk
2021, Sheboygan, WI
Collaborator/Performer
A three-part public practice project based on food traditions in Sheboygan. We collected recipes, cooked over the phone with people in Sheboygan, "tailgated" for everyday moments (the garbage pick-up, a finance meeting, a factory shift change), and assembled boxes of ingredients with instructions for residents to cook alongside us via short films on our website "menu." Commissioned by Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, WI.
The Ghost is Me
2019-2020, Berlin Germany; Asheville, NC
Creator/Performer
A solo performance combining dance and theatre exploring narrative through physicality on a journey of accepting responsibility in my place in a cultural landscape of the United States.
