Michelle Ellsworth and Brian Rogers
(Boulder, CO / Queens, NY, Lenapehoking)
Death Trips 1–3
World Premiere
An artist talk with Michelle Ellsworth and Brian Rogers will follow the screening.
Access: CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation) captioning will be provided at this event.
DESCRIPTION
In 2025, Michelle Ellsworth and Brian Rogers, both post-Mormons, completed the first of several planned collaborative cross-country drives following (in reverse) the Mormon Trail while dancing at the intersection of the classic McDonald’s Golden Arches and the Golden Plates. Their second itinerary, in September 2026, will terminate at PICA, where they will deliver 2.5 films and a public conversation. In an ill-fated but well-intentioned homage to James Benning’s cross-country travelogue The United States of America, Ellsworth and Rogers—armed with cameras, recording devices, industrial batteries, blenders, tents, toasters, kombucha, and The Book of Mormon—will meticulously document every moment of their co-tethered journey(s).
Sleeping in tents, redecorating their car’s interior, and co-opting corporate infrastructures, two dancers look to their settler-colonial ancestors for insight and tactics on surviving current budget cuts, AI, and loss. Was Joseph Smith onto something? Together, they reimagine “the field” (venues, audiences, funding, outfits, and shared governance) while building a new audience base in the often-neglected middle states. Subsisting on car-toasted Pop-Tarts, Ellsworth and Rogers will drive all day and edit all night while weeping their way from Boulder, CO, to Queens, NY, to PICA, and back again.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Michelle Ellsworth co-mingles technology, carpentry, and quilting with dance, in an attempt to choreograph high-functioning coping strategies for geopolitical (and personal) phenomena. A professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, Ellsworth is currently making a 7-inch recording with drummer Sean Meehan, creating a new dance for wood camera, and starting her next quilt, Quilt Complex #9.
Brian Rogers is a theater and film director, video and sound artist, and performing arts curator. Since 1997, Rogers has created films, performances, albums, and other time-based projects, including Small Songs (2023-2025); Screamers (2018); Hot Box (2012, co-presented with FIAF’s Crossing The Line Festival, PS122’s COIL Festival, Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, and supported by a MAP Fund grant); and the Bessie-nominated Selective Memory (2010). Rogers is the Co-Founder and Artistic Executive Director of The Chocolate Factory Theater, an internationally recognized venue for experimental dance, theater, and interdisciplinary performance based in Queens, NY. Now in its twenty-second year, Rogers serves as chief curator of The Chocolate Factory Theater’s artistic programming and leads its artistic and administrative operations.