the Fields of Decay Team:
Sophia Remolde
Sophia is a nomadic creator, performer, writer, healer, and lobsterbird. Using multimedia at the intersections of art/science, performing/visual arts, and nature/technology/spirituality, Sophia’s work celebrates the universal interconnectedness of the everyday.
Sophia is trained in a multitude of somatic, academic, and creative disciplines including Butoh, Noguchi Taiso, Viewpoints, Suzuki Method, Feldenkrais, Alexander Technique, Reiki, robotics, computer programming, photography, psychology (BA, Rutgers), and Performance and Interactive Media Arts (MFA, Brooklyn College). This interdisciplinary cross-pollination works to develop sensory perception, uniting imaginations in a shared mind-body field. The art takes many forms and is always site-specific, both a response to and a reflection of the environment for which it is made. It creates space for audience to enter into experience, infusing abstract ideas and images with meaning, making connections between daily life and greater spiritual relevance. In these spaces, one can experience a sense of safety and challenge within expanding boundaries, encouraging growth and healing for this world.
Sophia is Associate Director of Puppet Junction Productions and co-founder of artscience collectives The Night Bears and Robot Immigrants, producing work in NYC and touring internationally.
Leah Shelton
Leah is an Australian performance maker, choreographer and chameleon with a passion for the surreal, the subversive, and the absurd. Originally dance-trained, she has a diverse performance background which has seen her tour internationally to the US, Canada, Europe, UK, Japan and South Pacific. Her work has taken her from rigorous physical theatre in Japan to the variety world of Las Vegas, and she cut her teeth playing mad, powerful heroines with Frank Theatre and making pop-satire works with The Brides of Frank.
Leah is Co-Artistic Director of the high camp neo-tiki dance theatre company Polytoxic, with whom she has created and toured works including the live-art karaoke experience The BackUp Service, site-specific watertop projection work Trade Winds, mongrel tiki-circus show The Rat Trap and rose-coloured travelogue Teuila Postcards. She also co-founded the satire-dripping physically stylized female outfit The Brides of Frank, and spent over a decade working in the intense Suzuki Actor Training Method. She has worked with companies including PVI Collective, The Good Room, Phluxus2, Frank Theatre, Lala Parlour, Superhero Clubhouse (NY), SITI Company (NY) and Spiegelworld (USA).
Leah’s experimental arts practice was initiated through the interdisciplinary art-lab Time_Place_6, which spawned The Short Message Service, an audience driven performance work which used SMS to explore the ethics of control. Since then she continues to explore non-conventional modes of performance, an area which she is committed to interrogating in her personal arts practice and as a Producer of contemporary, cutting edge performance.
As a solo artist, Leah creates physical work that is highly visual and rather strange. Her adoration of design, illusion and the darkly absurd has seen her squash her whole body inside a suitcase, die onstage at least 132 times, train with SITI in New York, and tour throughout Holland and Belgium as a guest performer with the divas of La La Parlour. In 2014 she undertook a year-long contract in Spiegelworld’s Vegas Nocturne, a variety show based in the prestigious Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, USA.
Fields of Decay 