Sarah Marguier

 They Are All | Photographies by Sarah Marguier

They Are All

They Are All has been a transformative experience both as an artist, designer (set and costume) and photographer documenting the creative process. The process was also interwined with family and friendship with my partner Carl Faber, long time collaborator and friend of Tommy Noonan, as a collaborator light designer of They Are All and our son with us during the creative process and production of the show.

They Are All rehearsals and show | Photographies by Sarah Marguier

They Are All is a performance created by Murielle Elizéon and Tommy Noonan, and commissioned by the American Dance Festival. It involved a mixture of professional contemporary dancers and dancers living with Parkinson’s Disease and other traumatic brain injuries, and comprised the first phase of the Moving Through project. They Are All is both an original dance performance and a project centering the role of artistic technologies in seeding the ground for new scientific research. It is a multi-generational collaboration between choreographers, professional dancers, amateur dancers, data informaticists, researchers in physical therapy, neuroscientists and people living with Parkinson’s Disease. The scientific hypothesis of the project is that not only the tools and physical techniques employed in the creation process generate beneficial outcomes for people living with Parkinson’s Disease, but that also the cognitive-emotional engagement required to participate in a movement-based creative process itself further enhances those outcomes.

They Are All is therefore not a project “about” Parkinson’s Disease, nor is it a statement about the relative abilities or achievements of those members of the cast living with Parkinson’s or traumatic brain injuries. It is a dance work that is the result of a carefully crafted set of conditions and methods, peopled by diverse bodies and relationships on stage: many of the performers are caregivers, lovers, spouses, parents, former teachers, old friends or near strangers to one another – a network of related bodies that have their own stories, complex histories and unknown futures, together and apart. 

“It's about bodies rejoicing within limits rather than despairing beyond them. It's about age and time moving in and out of phase, now concordant, now grinding. It's about how each person's reality is scaled to the spread of their arms, the length of their stride. It's about the beauty of the possible and the possibility of transcendence.” – IndyWeek on They Are All

They Are All rehearsals | Photographies by Sarah Marguier

They Are All comprised the first phase of the Moving Through project. Moving Through enters its third year, drawing together partnerships with the American Dance Festival, Duke University, RTI International, South Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts and local partners in an ongoing effort to seed new perspectives in approaches to Parkinson’s disease. The project began with Culture Mill’s 2019 commission by the American Dance Festival: They Are All. Along the way, continuing and expanding classes in Durham and Alamance counties have brought partnerships with researchers at Duke and Wake Forest, and a multidisciplinary working group has sought to better understand and document our unique approach to Parkinson’s disease through movement in an artistic context.