Our bodies like dams
Sarah K. Finn
Set in a handmade, flooding city, this part love-story, part eco-fantasy, imagines a woman’s unexpected metamorphosis in the face of romantic and coastal decay.
Creator/Director: Sarah K. Finn
Director of Photography & Editor: Xuan Liu
Set Designer & Co-Puppet Builder: Karen Loewy Movilla
Sound Designer: Sid Diamond
Dancers/Puppet models: Evan Ray Suzuki and Tam Nguyen
Our bodies like dams is a short film made with animation, live-puppetry, miniature sets, and wearable sculpture, to follow a surrealistic narrative of a couple embracing as their apartment floods entirely. A seemingly straight apocalyptic love story, it gradually unfolds into a queer, post-human fantasy. A love letter to Brooklyn's disappearing shorelines, audience members are invited to join for the film's premiere, followed by an interactive installation of the film's sets, puppets, sculpture and process.
This project was developed with additional collaborators including: Shayna Strype, Marcella Murray, Amanda Card, Ash Winkfield, Camellia Bayle-Spence and Christina Tang.
The film, Our bodies like dams, is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).
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Sarah K. Finn is a Brooklyn-based multimedia artist who creates live performance, video and film. Her work explores mythic narratives set in post-industrial wastelands, to investigate humanity’s spiritual and ethical unknowns. Using surreal storytelling, video, physical performance, and puppetry, she makes worlds where queer and beyond-human futures emerge from modern ruins. Her work has been seen internationally at the 2019 Prague Fringe Festival and the Ponderosa Tanzland Festival in Stolzenhagen, Germany; and at home in the U.S at the 2020 Philadelphia Fringe (FringeArts), and various venues in NYC including The Tank, The Hudson Guild Theater, Cloud City, Movement Research, The Brick, Mabou Mines and Dixon Place. She is a 2022-2023 Object Movement Artist-in-Residence at the Center at West Park, and a 2022 Fresh Ground Pepper BRB Artist-in-Residence. Past residencies include Barn Arts Collective (2018, 2019) and The Cannery (2019). In 2018, she was the recipient of the Sherman Fairchild Grant in Art + Technology, and was shortlisted for The Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers for her play, In the woods where the men work. She trained at Ecole Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris, France and got her
BA from Sarah Lawrence College. sarahkfinn.com
Special Thanks
Fresh Ground Pepper's BRB Residency
*Our bodies like dams will be presented on a split bill with Ella Davidson.