“After I perform a dance, I write a poem. This is my most truthful account of that experience,” begins dance artist and poet Duhita Cori Kresge. However, she caveats, “Dance time has its own elusive logic. It seems that when I dance I am not me. I am emptied. I become an observer, a satellite, an animal, an oracle, a current, a lens. I can only try to tell you what happened.”

In Combustion Suite, Kresge plumbs a series of metamorphic performances, shedding her body’s “word-skin” as she reveals the proscenium’s feral fringes in cycles of shapeshifting, lancing, blazing, keening, and surfacing.

Combustion Suite doubles as rekindled refraction of Combustion, a piece by choreographer Wendy Osserman—Kresge’s “dance-mother” and kindred collaborator of decades—limited to a single performance due to the pandemic. The premature halt compelled Kresge, one of its dancers, to summon these poems from the experiential ash in which they held their breath.