CURRENT
Semi Ryu (using headset technology) and SooJung Chae (using spiritual technology) for my seeking gut
my seeking gut (2027)
A performance mash-up that explores the cross-cultural intersections of art, technology and healing, through the ancient Korean spiritual cleansing ritual “Ssitkim-gut”.
Moss choreographs and directs a collaboration including Semi Ryu, PH.D - Professor, Department of Kinetic Imaging, Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) School of the Arts, Associate Professor Department of Internal Medicine - her research focused on Korean healing rituals, Virtual Body, and Extended Reality; and Soo Jung Chae, a renown Pansori singer, Shamanic practitioner, and a professor of Korean Traditional Arts at Korea National University for the Arts. Incorporating AR/VR headset immersion, and audience participation, my seeking gut explores the nature of our experience: its trauma, compassion and spirituality.
The work is currently in-development with Korean and US premieres projected for fall 2026/spring 2027. Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University will present a seminar discussing the philosophies of experience provoked by the work September 24-27, 2026.
Test footage from the VR development process with the students from the VCU dept. of Kinetic Imaging
Video frame from hieidaira dewdrop loop (formerly Hieidaira/Kollwitz Project)
hieidaira dewdrop loop (2026)
This community video project asks residents of Hieidaira, Japan to enact scenes based on the haunting, grief-stricken prints of German artist, Kathë Kollwitz. Combined with misty locations and sounds of life from this suburban mountain village near Kyoto, the work evokes the tender sensibility of Issa Kobayashi in his haiku “a dewdrop world”.
Presented as a looping single-channel video, the work has completed its post-production and is currently being test screened. The video will have its premiere exhibition in Japan summer 2026. (location: tba)
RECENT
Mzamo Nondlwana in figures on a field at Tanzquartier Wien, October 2025 photo: Hannah Fasching
figures on a field (2005/2025)
“20 years after its premiere in New York, a seminal experimental dance piece by choreographer Dean Moss is given new lease of life with a Viennese cast.”
Tanzquartier Wien, Austria presents a 2025 re-staging of figures on a field, “highlighting the canon of recent African-American dance history by presenting this choreographic work in Europe for the first time.”
Rondo Hannemann, Cultural Critic for Online Merker, responds: “The brutality not only of the violence itself, but also the cool distancing of its presentation give the play its special effect. The aspect of power is the central to work: power and powerlessness, foreign and self-aggression. It is neither institutional nor structural nor politically or religiously motivated violence. It is the violence in us that lives here on the stage and in Ali's drawings.”
surface tension (2024)
A portrait of disabled dancer and artist’s model Sawami Fukuoka. This short digital film meditates on ways one navigates caustic insecurities through the telling of a traditional Japanese folk tale. It uses college and animation techniques to illuminate the tension between being and being seen.
Featuring a beautifully intimate performance by Ms. Fukuoka and delicate music by the band “Between”, the film is an Official Selection of the 2025 Video Art & Experimental Film Festival in New York City and an “International Award” recipient from the 2025 Under the Radar Film Festival for Artistic Film, Animation and Experimental Sequential Media in Vienna, Austria.
surface tension was shot in Hieidaira, Japan and North Hamptonshire, UK.
Your marks and surface (2023)
A delicately layered performance by Moss in collaboration with dancer Sawami Fukuoka, composer Stephen Vitiello and painter Angela Dufresne. Premiered February 23-25, 2023 at The Danspace Project, in New York City. The NY Times states, “That softness […] seems to exist in a plane parallel to the sounds and images of entrapment and struggle that pervade the work, just one of many tensions and contradictions that make “Your marks and surface” both unsettling and intensely engaging.” - full review here.
photo credit Ian Douglas
untitled:embrace (2022)
This short, conceptually agile dance film springs from contemporary performance combined with imperial, colonial and capitalist still imagery from 1880-1930, which again is juxtaposed with images of the conquered indigenous peoples of Argentina, Indonesia, various parts of West and South Africa, East and South Asia. The reflective focus and time frame is determined by the historical birth and burgeoning popularity of Tango in the early twentieth century. Positing the music and dance as a haunted experiential return on global colonial investments.
The work is a 2023 Official Selection of the Venice Intercultural Film Festival in Lido di Venezia, Italy; the Darkroom Film Festival in London, UK; the Experimental Film Festival in North Carolina, USA; and the Tokyo International Short Film Festival in Japan.
untitled:embrace was shot entirely on the bucolic grounds of the Dower House Estate, home to Xenia Creative Retreat, July 2022 in Upton Grey, North Hampshire. UK.
Untitled: perfect human (2020)
A digital film work completed in fall 2020, referencing Jørgen Leth's 1967 film "Perfect Human". The work was live streamed by The Danspace Project incorporating a conversation with the playwright/director Young Jean Lee in December 2020. It also won a 2020 This Week in New York Pandemic Award for BEST EXPERIMENTAL DIGITAL DANCE FILM and is an Official Selection of the 2021 MOVING BODY Festival in Varna, Bulgaria.