"It’s possible to glean some of this story during the show, even as the purposefully jumbled production thwarts linearity and clarity, decrying those qualities as restrictively male. In place of coherence, the show has energy. Goaded by the live music of Idgy Dean, a one-woman band, the eager cast of 10 continually passes through the central space on multiple trajectories, sometimes hurling their bodies with great force, sometimes balancing against one another with delicacy."

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"So if the wide expanse of the ETLE Universe or the unlanguageable nature of this thing seems intimidating, Rosner is simply doing what she set out to do—and the meaning excavated from the piece may be different for every single person who encounters it. “Hopefully, something in this will make you feel some way,” she says. “You don’t have to feel the same way as me. We can disagree and that can be part of it, as well.” The ETLE Universe defies labels on its own, and that’s what makes it as groundbreaking as ever."

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"Sarah A.O. Rosner is a MAXIMALIST. It says so right on her knuckles. 
And it says so all over her massive, epic, daring, rebellious, sprawling and uncontainable work.

The ETLE Project is a queer feminist cyborg time-travel epic.  Over the course of three years this multitudinous endeavor will include a dance performance, a video game, a fashion show, a concept album, photography, fiction, essays, and even pornography. ETLE has already accrued forty-two collaborators and fifteen curators, and Rosner is looking to add at least twenty more curators. 

“It’s a fucking massive thing.” 

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“Who is ETLE?” one of them says, loudly, over the cacophony of lecturing peers.
“The truth is, we don’t really know.”
“You must create your own network of understanding,” another says.
The goal, says another, is to “keep humanity alive long enough to evolve.”

In the back of the space, musician Idgy Dean performs a live soundtrack of her concept album for the Universe. The score includes looping beats, vocals and guitar to create a repetitive soundscape that feels primal, mystical, just out of reach.

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What does ETLE want?  The idea teases my mind, but I can’t isolate a single thread.  It’s not linear.  The unknowability is intense.  I concentrated in my folding chair for a good ninety minutes while female and queer bodies danced and moved and spoke, and Idgy Dean’s live score washed over me.  There were long and gorgeous phrases that seized my mind, and now they’re gone.

Is it a multitudinous plot?  I don’t.,,..OH!
God, I love the glitch!

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Rosner’s looking to not only create a queer narrative, but also “queer all of these structures that are based on singularity and based on simplicity and clarity.” She doesn’t want there to be one explanation of what this project is or tell people how they should experience it or what they should take away from it.

Everything still starts with dance—every week the collective gets together and asks questions like, what does it mean to use the body-based process of performance, so focused on authenticity, to create a work that is science fiction? How do they embody a future femininity or masculinity? How do they display what a future queer body looks like? But now Rosner has the ability to reach beyond the constraints of dance while she wonders, “What would it be like to envision time, to envision desire, to envision relationships in this way that is multiplus and unknowable and always shifting and restructuring reality into a queer valuing of those events? I feel like that’s both the narrative of the project and the way we’ve been creating it and the way to experience it.”

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"It may be intellectually challenging to grasp what exactly the ETLE Universe project proposes by “a queer/feminist cyborg-time-travel epic,” but thankfully I was able to chat with choreographer and Universe founder Sarah A.O. Rosner about its inception and agenda. Rosner, the prodigy behind the A.O. Movement Collective, which aims to create and promote the arts through sustainable business practices, launched the Universe this past November."

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A performance/party at Roulette is just the first phase of “ETLE Universe,” described in press materials as “a queer/feminist cyborg-time-travel epic.” Devised by the choreographer Sarah A.O. Rosner, the project will roll out in 10 multidisciplinary stages over the next two years. (A 3D printing venture, creative writing collection and fashion show are in store.) For now, a night of hype-building reverie awaits, promising pop-up performances, “audience abductions” and a keynote address from the ambitious Ms. Rosner.

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I met with Rosner and four of her dancers during one of their rehearsals at Soundance in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. At the time of the meeting, the A.O. Movement Collective recently received the news that their scheduled season at Dance New Amsterdam (DNA) would have to happen elsewhere as the institution shut its doors in October.

“When DNA closed, we were obviously in a bad situation. We had to find a new venue and recoup emergency funding,” says Rosner. “We also had to figure a way that this set back wouldn’t mean that we would have to scrap our whole season.” Thankfully, the A.O. Movement Collective has found an alternative space, Roulette in Brooklyn on November 23. The new venue means that the artists will be unveiling Rosner’s most ambitious project yet,the ETLE Universe.

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"By far, the foxiest, scariest object on hand at Object as Performer, a program of videos and dances curated by Sarah Dahnke, is actually two objects--a needle and thread in the hands of dancers Anna Adams Stark and Emily Skillings in barrish (curation #4)...

Since the women's movements are so small, close and intimate, this prelude of sorts serves to shift the crowd's consciousness, taking watchers from the energy of the urban nighttime streets to something quieter, more sensual. But with a distinct edge. After all, we're watching that always-threatening sewing needle, the implication of piercing flesh. We watch the women sew together a patch of each of their lightweight, stretchy shirts, winding the length of thread around that point of connection. Each one them pulls back from this curious suture, making visible lines of force between them as they move, externalizing their interdependence, their balance and imbalance, their support and risk."

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"Sitting in the gallery, two women sewed the torsos of their shirts together in a dance exchange. Mouths nearly touching, pulling the other close to loop the thread through the two thin fabrics with a tangible urgency. The word that came to mind was erotic. But it was more than that, it was tender. Emotive. We were witnessing the budding beginnings of a relationship. The excitement and passion and obsessiveness, the testing of boundaries and freedom as the two bodies pulled apart, the fabric grown taught, until they snapped. One woman fell to the floor. The other, hurt and angry, turned and ran out through a door. This was our cue, as an audience, to come follow her path and take a seat in the performance space."

"The seven performers of A. O. Movement Collective — three men, four women — bring a raw, vulnerable quality to their movement that’s highly arresting. They look untutored, improvisatory and unpolished, so that a regular dancegoer starts to wonder how much technique any of them has ever tried to acquire. They don’t even look as if they spend time at the gym. Three of the women are round-faced and don’t conform to the general physical type of dancers. Two of the men are bearded, the third unshaven. All seven talk, and one of them sings, very well. One woman points her feet once, slowly, as if testing the water, but that’s a deliberately eccentric effect.

“90 Ways to Wake From Drowning” — an hour long work that had its world premiere at the Joyce SoHo over the weekend, with choreography by Sarah A. O. Rosner and the performers — soon surprises you by demonstrating just how exact these movements are. Certain scenes repeat, and repeat again, and the rawness of the movement doesn’t change in the least. These dancers will disappoint if you want perfection of form. But they bring such immediacy to what they do that you follow them as if they were caught up in a story, one so strange that aspects of it bear retelling...

...I followed almost all of it with my heart in my mouth."

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"With the world premiere of 90 ways to Wake from drowning, Sarah A.O. Rosner and her ensemble, The A.O. Movement Collective, have taken an important, assertive step into the spotlight of contemporary dance. After two years of developing 90 ways--their first evening-length work and first New York season--these performers show a remarkable cohesion and intensity that other troupes might take a decade or more to achieve. Rosner and her young colleagues are ready to rock...

...Rosner's brutal focus on relationships and emotions might seem retro, but there's nothing cliched or formulaic about how she handles these things in her theater...I also marveled at the outright, raw ferocity of her dancers. At first, I was thinking it was only the men--Cory Antiel, Jon Cooper and Rowan Magee--and I wanted more edginess from the women. But forget that. The women-- Bito along with Lillie DeArmon, Cristina Jasen and Larissa Sheldon--turn out to be plenty edgy, like a python wrapping itself around your neck and torso. The entire company keeps the audience on edge at all time.

"I just need to see it again." Yeah, I could see this one again. And whatever's next in Rosner's plans. The only question, now, is whether to take anxiety meds before or after. Keep an eye on this choreographer and this collective."

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"This young, Brooklyn-based dance company will have its first New York season at Joyce SoHo, where it will present an evening-length work for seven dancers by its founder, Sarah A. O. Rosner. The piece is called “90 Ways to Wake from Drowning,” and it’s a messy, rough-and-tumble affair, a mix of storytelling and muscular partnering, with a kind of explosive energy."

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"In “90 ways to Wake from drowning,” a new work that will have its debut at Joyce SoHo on July 30 and 31, choreographer Sarah A.O. Rosner and her A.O. Movement Collective communicate a profound hopelessness but also a tenderness — and queerness — that embodies the new American generation...

...The group is ever-present, standing, watching, stamping heavily together, or falling down listlessly and staring off into the emptiness. Several repeating duets showcase strong lifts, intimate couplings, mundane details, a violent yet precise competitive choreography of plastic bag tossing and catching that ends in a harmonious rejection of the thing — and plenty of gender mixing. These earnest dances are the heart of the work, and underscore its disappointed hopefulness. Solos express more self-destructiveness — loss of control, anger, the irony of invincibility. Jasen’s rendition of “Piece of My Heart” takes the song to a darkly literal heart-breaking extreme...

... Lofty ideals — including what Rosner calls “anti-ephemeral pomo humanism” — and informed determination will continue to guide the principles and actions of Rosner and her A.O. triad. She has already taken her place standing with the revolutionaries of dance."

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"There is an ominous, catastrophic crash of metal meeting metal before the blinding flash of light captures five figures standing horrified around an inert body. They stare down a moment, disbelieving, before dispersing into fruitless action as each reacts to the event in their own, chaotically nonsensical way. “I just need to see it again,” Ilona Bito desperately implores in the opening sequence of Sarah A.O. Rosner’s 90 ways to Wake from drowning, a work of dance theatre which had its premiere at the Joyce SoHo. The stage is littered with plastic grocery bags and strewn with the relics of technology; televisions and VCRs dominate while the sleek black innards of VHS and cassette tapes stream across the floor. Lauren Parrish’s nuanced understanding of light gives profound depth to the air. Between the rending of the performance space and Ms. Bito’s piteously plea it is clear: Something Has Happened."

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"I enjoyed watching Rosner observe and offer notes on the material. Even when tuning highly physical vocabulary (Bito spent a lot of time upside down), Rosner uses language more like a theater director’s to coax out the environment she’s looking for. It showed in the way the pair’s slow wrestle seemed more like an impassioned discussion in movement than a pas de deux. Rosner’s work isn’t about using dance to represent life; you instead feel like you’re observing interactions within a community that speaks through bodily contact. This strikes a chord of authenticity in solid dialogue with how dance as an art form works, and anchors the more angst-ridden moments, which could become indulgent, to real emotional bedrock."

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"In Love and Defense of the Ones I Destory"

"Finally, Sarah Rosner’s In Love and Defense of the Ones I Destroy ended the program with a compelling display of male identity and their relationships with women and each other. To music ranging from the harsh sounds of strings to the wistful, “You are My Sunshine”, thirteen men hustled, bounced off the wall, and drifted in and out of love. Four women streamed into the men’s paths and dragged away their own broken bodies. Bravo to these performers, especially the men, many who had no previous dance experience.

"(Don't) Let Go" and "Who it has Loved: a physical history of you and a love poem for my bones"

"The beginning duet was intense in the physical interaction between the two dancers – a violence in white, accented by the white clothesline.  The uncomfortable and the comforting collided on stage...classic A.O. choreography – not in its subject matter or refined movement, but rather in its composition.  Ms. Rosner revels in cooperative choreography and engaging her company in self- and movement discovery.