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By Sarah Cecilia Bukowski
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Published on April 7, 2026
Emma Judkins and Grace Yi-Li Tong. Photo: Amelia Golden
At Matins or Evensong
Choreography by Emma Judkins
Performance by Emma Judkins and Grace Yi-Li Tong
Music by Adam Schatz
Lighting design by Shana Crawford
Costumes by Ayano Elson
Kestrels
March 19, 2026
It’s amazing what a few well-placed lights in a clear and well-tended space can do. Kestrels, an artist-run venue in Gowanus, Brooklyn, is just such a space: fresh white-painted brick walls and a smooth, bare wood-panelled floor offer an unadorned yet beautifully proportioned arena for performance, comfortable and open in its uncrowded intimacy. A network of clip lights rigged with square lighting gels runs along pipes on the ceiling and high along the walls, and portable LEDs sit on tables in the downstage corners, yet none of it feels provisional or haphazard. The subtly-shifting washes of color and dramatic shadows conjured by lighting designer Shana Crawford narrate Emma Judkins’ extended duet At Matins or Evensong with the kind of care and intention that only light, with its elemental power to illuminate or obscure, can imbue.
I begin with light because it’s the first thing I notice, and the thing that I continue to feel present as a voice in this spare and moving work. As the side-reclining figures of the two human performers, Judkins and Grace Yi-Li Tong, emerge out of an almost total darkness, the light plays first over a dense grid of tiny rhinestones covering Judkins’ shirt, which glitters restlessly even in stillness. This percolating undercurrent pervades their otherwise equanimous dancing, which builds patiently, step by step: surging, cresting, and opening into moments of calm that sustain the thread of the work, holding its tension without straining its fibers. Adam Schatz’s plangently multivocal score lends sonic depth to this undercurrent, with translucent layers of saxophone or constellations of piano chords that rise and fade in turn as each instrument casts the color of its tonal mood on the dance. These design elements, as much as the space itself, hold the dance without imposing upon it, allowing its textural nuances and gestural languages to blossom in their fullness.
At Matins or Evensong . Photo: Amelia Golden
Judkins and Tong dance much of the duet in softly-swept unison, guided by the inexorable cadences of gravity. Pacing and lunging through traveling phrases, they move together and apart in ways that render their stage deceptively vast, their distances as intimate as their closeness, shadows dancing along the walls. Their movements reach beyond the scope of their bodies, trailing past the tips of sensitive fingers, probing the ground under sliding feet, and imagining landscapes held in eyes that gaze toward remembered horizons. In a recurring sequence that sways with the rhythm of an incantation, they summon the columns of their verticality in profile, looking toward an arm tossed in a backward arc, casting off without rancor as they turn swing into deep alternating side lunges, arms threshing through space and spiraling to rest.
Familiar postures glint with attention to the small details that shift their tone: a hand held up, palm out, face turned toward or away. Pensive yet alert, they trace inner worlds with the measuring touch of their hands or cross and fold of their arms, expanding to signal in tandem poetic semaphore. Walking patterns shift through shallow and sharp diagonals and precise arcs as they build to swirling, bounding phrases that propel them equally into lushness of their bodies’ breadth and the suspense of sudden stillness. In a brief passage of contact, they each place a hand on the other’s shoulder, their arms entwined as they explore conjoinment and mirroring as modes of togetherness that lend new dimension to their unison. They repeat their incantation once more in gathering silence, and as their golden hour glow fades to dark, they settle together, gazes turned calmly and resolutely toward the horizon.
At Matins is a dance that radiates outward and inward at once, a dance of being and becoming. In it I find a balm, one that offers sensations that might point me toward how to hold it all—the burning world, my changing self, endless each others—with grace, patience, and care.
