Who I am and what I'm up to
I am a multidisciplinary artist, obsessed with embodiment, community, and reinvention. Trained as a dancer and choreographer, I also work with video, text, and installation. I am nonbinary, queer, Jewish, a former sex-worker, a person with PTSD, living in Lenapehoking/Philadelphia. As a child I wanted to be an elephant when I grew up. You could call this my plan B.
I work in spiral time, revisiting themes of gender, animality, Jewish Diasporism, sexuality, trauma, and collectivity from new contexts and with new collaborators. I get off on moments of agency and imaginative possibility. Some works depend upon the interaction of audience and performer. A circus about revolution with multiple endings, whose course is determined by audience choices. Tactile dances in which a single blind-folded audience member is led through experiences of weight sharing, sound, texture, and touch, collaborating with the dancers who guide the performance.
My work is danced creative nonfiction, which is to say: I want to facilitate real experiences. In Sex Werque I investigated the complexities of power, gender performance, and labor conditions in the strip clubs by interviewing my former coworkers and playing back those conversations over close-ups of our jiggling flesh as we twerked and grinded. In Everything After I abstracted improvisational and choreographic movement scores from PTSD therapies to uplift the labor of trauma survivors.
My process is sparked by curiosity, fueled by collaboration, research, and humor, and refined by vulnerability and specificity. The result are works that speak directly to communities that rarely see their experiences reflected in a nuanced and embodied way. Queer, Jewish was a night of storytelling and dance reflecting the experiences of LGBTQ+ Jews and honoring the way we read between the lines of our sacred texts and reinvent our tradition – the ultimate intergenerational art project.
Ultimately, I want to understand who we are, how we got here, how we’re thinking and feeling about all that, and where we want to go next.
I work in spiral time, revisiting themes of gender, animality, Jewish Diasporism, sexuality, trauma, and collectivity from new contexts and with new collaborators. I get off on moments of agency and imaginative possibility. Some works depend upon the interaction of audience and performer. A circus about revolution with multiple endings, whose course is determined by audience choices. Tactile dances in which a single blind-folded audience member is led through experiences of weight sharing, sound, texture, and touch, collaborating with the dancers who guide the performance.
My work is danced creative nonfiction, which is to say: I want to facilitate real experiences. In Sex Werque I investigated the complexities of power, gender performance, and labor conditions in the strip clubs by interviewing my former coworkers and playing back those conversations over close-ups of our jiggling flesh as we twerked and grinded. In Everything After I abstracted improvisational and choreographic movement scores from PTSD therapies to uplift the labor of trauma survivors.
My process is sparked by curiosity, fueled by collaboration, research, and humor, and refined by vulnerability and specificity. The result are works that speak directly to communities that rarely see their experiences reflected in a nuanced and embodied way. Queer, Jewish was a night of storytelling and dance reflecting the experiences of LGBTQ+ Jews and honoring the way we read between the lines of our sacred texts and reinvent our tradition – the ultimate intergenerational art project.
Ultimately, I want to understand who we are, how we got here, how we’re thinking and feeling about all that, and where we want to go next.
My basic artist bio
Ella-Gabriel Mason (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and bodyworker. Their performance work has been presented in Pittsburgh at the New Hazlett Theater, Kelly-Strayhorn Theater, and Carnegie Stage; in NYC at WOW! Cafe Theater, BAAD!, and wild project; in Philadelphia at vox populi and the Cannonball Festival. Mason has received grants from the Heinz Endowments, PA Council on the Arts, the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, and the Leeway Foundation. Mason is currently an instructor at Temple University where they teach composition, improvisation, dance science and somatics, and research methods. In addition to their work as a creator and performer, Mason is a licensed massage therapist specializing in myofascial and trauma-sensitive bodywork.
The whole CV
is viewable here