Eryka & Nola | Make the Brutal Tender
film by Michael Casker (NY, 2024)
Mini portrait film about the relationship that developed between Eryka Dellenbach and Nola Sporn Smith through working together on Make the Brutal Tender...and the work that resulted from that relationship. Filmed five years after the project’s last pre-pandemic showing, it marks the first time the collaborators returned to the studio together to revisit and embody the old ritual. Filmed on 16mm celluloid between the Woods Studio in Queens and Moodna Creek in New Windsor—two sites central to the piece’s creation and transformation.
15-minutes @ Movement Research at the Judson Memorial Church
Video: Quentin Burley
Original Sound by// Hanna Elliott for the work
Costumes by// DOBS (Elanur Erdogan)
Performed by// Nola Sporn Smith, Hanna Elliott & Eryka Dellenbach
Program Notes:
Make the Brutal Tender is a dance with the limbic system. It is a ritual of consent and a dance of thresholds. It is about conflict and rivalry between women. It is about instinct and desire as they relate to tenderness. Music and musician act as catalyst, control, pressure and disrupter.
NEW Trailer
Site-specific movement research:
Moodna Creek (New Windsor, NY)
9/24/18
Eryka piercing water current
*doc by Nola
Reeds with Nola, 9/10/18 @ Gibney
Work with Jasmine throughout 2018 at Outerspace Studios, Hamlin Park & the Archer Ballroom
B e f o r e t h e T e n d e r
(Sound + Movement collaboration with HOGG, 2016-17)
P E R E G R I N E M I D W E S T:
A Shared Evening with Jessica Cornish & Eryka Dellenbach
HOGG X Eryka Dellenbach
WRETCH X Jessica Cornish
Links Hall, Chicago
2017