Inside a translucent, suffocating stage, choreography and architecture meet the limits of endurance. Alexa West and Adam Charlap Hyman discuss Jawbreaker with Sam Ozer.
Jawbreaker is Alexa West’s year-long choreographic project that explores patriotism and exhaustion through a fusion of athletic movements, Shaker rituals, and postmodern dance from the 1970s to the present. In a translucent aquamarine plastic environment created by CH & Herrero and set to relentless gabber beats, the dancers perform to the point of physical exhaustion. The piece premiered in New York City at PAGEANT and later at 99 Canal. It recently had its international premiere as part of TONO Festival 2026 in Mexico City, presented with the support of 99 Canal.
TONO artistic director Sam Ozer moderated a conversation over Zoom between Alexa and Adam Charlap Hyman, of CH & Herrero. Alexa, who has presented work at SculptureCenter and the 2023 Performa Biennial, among others, is the next artist-in-residence at MoMA’s studio. She is also the co-founder of Pageant, a venue in Brooklyn that presents performances by emerging choreographers. Adam is the co-founder of CH & Herrero, a Los Angeles / New York / Mexico City-based architecture and design firm who work across various typologies – including buildings, set designs, stores and houses. In 2026, CHH received the Smithsonian National Design Award for their innovative contributions to environments that advance the understanding of our spatial experiences.
In this conversation, they spoke about virtuosity in design and dance, referencing ranging from Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire to Danh Vo and Franco Mazzucchelli, implicating the audience in scenography, and deciding to wrap the room in plastic, imagining it as a “tool for painting without painting.”
Sam Ozer: How did you guys meet?
Alexa West: I reached out to Adam after he saw the SculptureCenter show.
Adam Charlap Hyman: I’d seen the SculptureCenter and the Performa Gala projects. Actually, the first thing that I saw of yours was the “Department of Aging,” which was at 99 Canal [which Sam Ozer organized].
Sam: That’s fun! That’s full circle…
Adam: It totally blew my mind! That piece is so incredible and terrifying. I was so struck by the movements of these dancers. I had never seen anything really like it, and certainly not that close. It was kind of tight quarters in that space [99 Canal], and to the point that it was almost a little scary to be so close to the metal that was getting ripped apart, but I was really moved by that piece. In particular, it was the dancers and their choreography, but also their relationship to the objects, to the filing cabinets. It was so spatial. It had an architectural element to it in a way. At that performance, I really became a fan of yours, Alexa!
Alexa: Thanks, that’s so sweet of you to say! I’m really glad you saw that one, and I’m glad since, Sam, it’s our full tie‑back origin story. I think after that, Adam briefly, at some point, sent me a message: “If you ever need help, let me know.” Then I was like, “Please help me, please,” and we went and got coffee. The references we were both pulling from and discussing, in terms of materials and scenography, were more, as you said, close to the body and not so far away. I felt a kinship with the way you were approaching, or thinking through, different references and your research model of materials. So I think, from there, I was like, “We have to work together,” and I just have to find a way.
Sam: Amazing! How did it come up again to actually work together, specifically on “Jawbreaker”?
Alexa: I think that was around the winter of ’24. I was like, “Oh, I’m going to start a process, and let me loop you back in when I have a better understanding of what it needs.”
Sam: In terms of the actual process, how far along was Jawbreaker choreographed before Adam got involved? Because, from what I understand, I think scenography is incredibly important to dance and other forms of live art, personally, but I also know there are different shows where maybe the choreography exists and then there are different realisations of what the scenography is. In this case, it really was kind of like they were married together, from what I understand.
Alexa: Yeah, so I believe, Adam, you started coming to rehearsals about a quarter of the way through the process, but it was still unbaked, and we were just working through a movement quality, right?
Adam: You did have an idea at that point for the lamp, a little undefined, but you knew you needed one, and you had ideas for this sort of cruciform base. But it was unclear what the room would look like, what the stage would look like.
Alexa: Then, at a certain point, there was a halfway mark where the dancers and I had been in research and development. I then reached out to Adam and his team, saying, “Here’s what I’m thinking in terms of a defining space.” Adam and Louisa started coming to rehearsals at Pageant more seriously and getting room measurements. I’m trying to remember our initial idea. There was an idea of a room wrap, I remember…
Adam: I think my first impulse was, because the dance felt very big and it was going to be in the Pageant space was to deal with the entire space and turn it into something entirely of our own. We had this idea of wrapping the entire space. Then the question around what to wrap it in became one of colour, texture, and application alongside logistics and cost. We played around with a lot of different ideas for what we could wrap the space in. Alexa and I had kind of a whole tête-à-tête around this. What emerged that was really fun was the necessity of some kind of storage element for the clothes that the dancers would change into. Once we started wrapping our heads around that costume change, the plastic, which had been in the mix, became really exciting because we realised that the plastic could potentially hold the clothes behind it on the wall. That conversation evolved with regard to the plastic and how cool it could really be. We did tests and figured out how it would really stick. We certainly understood that the translucency of the plastic would have a really nice property, as it wrapped around the elements of the Pageant space, blanketing or coating the space and making everything that is inconsistent in its way, very consistent, unified, and uniform. We liked that it would sort of coat and clarify everything while still allowing, if you look closely, a little bit of the space to show. You could see, in fact, all the mullions of the windows, the pipes, the air conditioners and transitions in the floor material. That was really a nice thing about the plastic.
I think we didn’t quite anticipate the feel, the sort of suffocating feeling of wrapping the entire space. We did think about that, but I think we couldn’t have really understood quite how impactful that would be until we did it. Wouldn’t you say, Alexa?
Alexa: Yeah. I think we imagined it being almost like a tool for painting without painting. I’ll say that Pageant as a space serves a lot of different purposes, so we couldn’t do anything too permanent. It had to have a short lifespan in the room. So this is also Adam’s way of dealing with that temporality and being very smart about a material landscape that could be applied. But I think once it all got in the room and laid out, the absurdism and the kind of sexy claustrophobia of it really came to light with the amount. I think that amount of plastic in a room was really effective for an audience member. It had this squishy sound. Especially at Pageant, you could hear them really stepping and jumping on it. It also had this glisten, these beams of light coming off of it. I think it was doing this beautiful symmetry to the dance where it’s very beautiful and entrancing to look at, but also intense and maybe a little overwhelming, but something you’re willing to deal with.
Adam: I think the restraint that the dancers show at different times in the piece and the sort of discomfort of what they are doing themselves, and for an audience watching them, has an interesting relationship with the plastic, which, as you said, was very beautiful at first glance, and then very nerve-wracking, the more you sort of took it in.
Alexa: A really important part was that it was nice to dance on. You chose a material that would be more pleasurable for the dancers than choosing something else, which I think shows me also your knowledge of what a body needs in different spaces. You’re not like, “Let’s sandpaper everywhere!” They were so happy to be on that plastic rather than even the wood floor.
Adam: I like your analogy of paint: painting without painting, dipping the whole space into one color so that you can see all of the dancers and the different facets of the piece isolated and surrounded by basically a green screen. And it’s so legible! It just made everything so legible.
And then there’s the aspect of wrapping the chairs, which was part of a larger idea of involving the audience in the space, inviting them close to the piece, but then enveloping the space that they were sitting in as well. You played with this line between them, actually participating, and watching, and I think that that made it all the more compelling, maybe even uncomfortable.
Alexa: Well, now that I’m thinking back, one of our first conversations was me talking about wanting the audiences to feel more implicated in the work and not pictorially separated, even though I sometimes like that the dance can have a frame or a wall without an audience on it so it can exist as an image separate to the performance. We had discussed how to implicate the audience more. Now that I’m thinking back to how we wrapped the chairs, that entirely did it as they sat down and felt the crunch, and weren’t able to even move their chair, because it was wrapped into its own place. This provided an audience experience that didn’t overwhelm their experience of the dance, but it definitely had an impact on people.
Sam: In Mexico City, you really brought people into the piece because it was this massive room, but then you were so locked in, almost like in encaustic wax or something. Everything felt very enclosed within the space. And then the lights felt like this kind of shimmering, reflective pool. There was this really interesting effect, I think, that was quite successful with it.
Adam, in terms of your first ideas, I know that with your interior design process, you do a lot of early discussions with clients around reference images. Did you have reference images for this project, or was this really just based on seeing rehearsals and speaking with Alexa?
Adam: We did! We had done it in person, with printed out pictures, but then these were the ones that we gathered as jumping off points, and then we had to group them into different sections. Louisa and I then went and made these options based on them, always with the idea of the total wrap. They were all representing just different, different approaches to the total wrap.
I know that we were looking at the work of Franco Mazzucchelli and his use of sort of like thin, diaphanous plastic that gets inflated into rooms. Those were crazy pieces. He had very lightweight plastic and fans inflating it. So cool! He did them in a few different locations
We were thinking a lot about translucency and different kinds of imprints, sort of ghostly residue on the page. We had like the lawn from Chatsworth that was in a drought, showing the layout of a baroque garden that had been gone for like 300 years. Wow. And the Danh Vo piece, where he replaced the velvet in the Vatican Museum.
Alexa: It was one of my favourite references!
Adam: Yeah, he had offered to replace all the velvet in the Vatican Museum cases in exchange for the old velvet, which was, like, 100 plus years, and was faded with all of the different relics and stuff and made this kind of patchwork.
We also looked at a Japanese artist who took boards of wood from Hiroshima and made a traditional Japanese print in the 50s where they dip the wood and stamp it.
Also, the Robert Gober chair, my favourite! And there was this other Scarpa Palermo exhibition where he did this very tightly pleated fabric, and we were thinking about these sorts of grids and maybe using the plastic to do some sort of checked version.
Adam: We were gonna get burlap and bring it out to a field and have it sun bleached and accelerate the bleaching somehow with maybe figures. We should do that, Alexa, for something.
Alexa: I think so. I think that’s the next one.
Adam: We just need a longer runway, because that will take some time, but it would be so cool. But this was kind of how we started…
Sam: Alexa, it’s a bit outside of the full collaboration with Adam, but I think talking about the sound, because I know that that’s something that you created, is interesting for this conversation as well.
Alexa: Yeah, it’s so funny, I forgot that I did the sound. I just imagine it pre-exists in the world and I just found it online, but I did indeed make it. I pull from different websites where people can upload field recordings or their own found sounds, and then some of the sounds I bring in are my own field recordings. It’s just creating a collage of sounds.
How we work in rehearsal is that I’ll play a couple of sounds on top of each other, looping, and I see if it changes either the dancer’s performance qualities or even the speed of their movement. I don’t know if y’all feel this way, but music is the most manipulative thing in my life. Like, if I want to feel happier, if I’m in a sad mood, I put on like a very, very intense EDM song or something hyperpop. And it’s like drugs. It gets me really amped. Or if I wanna cry, I can put on a sad song. And so I’m trying to, in rehearsal, use sound as a tool to see if a different quality can be evoked.
For this work, we had a rehearsal with just that first beat sound and the first musical sound that comes in the beginning of “Jawbreaker,” and the dancers just went crazy. I’d never made work to music before, or had them dance on a beat. Usually I like to put music as an additional layer on top, but it’s not actually in correspondence to the choreography. With this one, it definitely felt like an opportunity for the dancers to either be with the music, like riding it, or resisting it and kind of blocking it from having them move. I felt like a real determination of the work was whether they were like going on the beat and they can have certain movements that can ride it, or if they’re just like in a static, painful resistance of it. It’s built in a similar way to the dance. It’s very collage, very additive in figuring out sections and having that layered with the dance.
Sam: And also moments of repetition that loop back, especially at the end, where there are different moments of duets of people doing the kind of movement on the lamppost. And then it’s like one couple, and then someone almost taps and taps out and switches.
Alexa: Yeah, and figuring out also what the sound is that will help an audience get into what the dance is, without distracting them. So for that section, it was just one solid beat the whole time that was kind of heartbeating and kind of meditative state, but wasn’t supposed to add anything in addition because the dancers are doing so much in trying to be in unison and trying to outperform each other and then trying to keep the choreography as true to form as they can. They’re just getting so exhausted and they’re looking at each other and going around this lamppost. So the music is supposed to be supplementary to help the audience and help the dancers.
Sam: Yeah, it also maintains the energy in the end.
Alexa: And maintain the energy for everyone, for all parts. I always joke, it sounds like it’s for someone who’s never heard techno before, and they think they just made up techno, and they didn’t. They’re like, “I made this sound that’s very intense and aggressive, do you want to hear it?” People are like, “This is terrible techno music.”
Sam: It’s a good point, actually. It works within the context of everything happening, but if it were listened to alone…
Alexa: Yeah, or it’s deconstructed in this way where you’re like, did you think about how this affects a body at all? Like these beats are painful to be inside of, you know?
Sam: Yeah, there’s some, there’s some moments that they really clash, and then there’s some moments where it’s more kind of in the flow of, let’s say.
Alexa: Yeah, and something I’m usually interested in is making virtuosic dance to look at, but then it’s kind of too much to look at. It’s too much to listen to, and then it’s exciting to listen to. And I think the set design also reflected that. I like to think about who the character of the person who wraps the room in green is. I don’t know if that’s Adam or me, or if that’s someone else who has an obsession you encounter. You walk into this room and you’re like, who did this? Why would they have done this? What’s their incentive? And that’s a lot of the driver, who would make this music?
Sam: Do you have a character in your head who you’re actually imagining?
Alexa: I think it kind of grows with the dance. It’s like the logic of the dance kind of defines the person who’s making it, and I’m sure there’s a sub-character of myself.
Sam: Totally, I think also with a piece, and maybe even with how the audience has to sit, there’s always this, as you said, virtuosity, some grand gestures, and then there’s also these awkward moments. I feel like you have these moments where it comes together and there’s also intentional dissonance, whether it’s between the sound or how someone’s feeling in the theatre, the type of movement the dancer is making, which is also very funny.
Alexa: Yeah, it’s putting those things in the same room and being like, virtuosity can exist with awkwardness or lethargy or broken-downness. That’s why I really liked the moment where they go and change, where it’s like, yes, this postmodern dance you just watched is now the same thing as taking a break and getting changed, is now the same thing as this kind of militant cheerleader ballet drill, you know? Like they’re all in the same dance. Don’t worry about it.
Adam: I love the idea of a kind of awkward virtuoso. I think that’s such a cool way to sum it up. This set is sort of exactly that. It’s like this grand gesture that’s extremely icky, but it’s also succinct and there’s something elegant about it. Yet there’s also something very nasty about it. It has similar principles for sure.
Sam: For you, Adam, were the plastic squeaking noises something you were thinking about in the choice of the material?
Adam: Yeah. Of course, we couldn’t have really known just how much it would be. I think it was unanticipated that it would create a crinkling noise on its own as it unfastened itself from everything in the room. It was always kind of in a state of movement, and that was really not what I was thinking was gonna happen. But the squeaking we did and we were excited about that.
I guess what I was thinking about with the squeaking was that when you sit in the front row at the ballet, you can hear everything that is going on on stage. You can hear them breathing and hitting the floor, and it’s really so shocking, but it’s kind of an unintentional invitation to appreciate the physicality and spatial quality of what you’re watching. I don’t think that you’re supposed to hear, but you just do if you sit really close. So I think I saw this as an opportunity because the audience would be sitting close and would be in the same room and I was thinking about the “Department of Aging” and I saw this as an opportunity to take that stimulating, energizing experience and and do something with it that was more intentional and put a sharper edge on understanding the body hitting the floor or the wall and twisting and sliding.
Alexa: I think the final thing that we haven’t said is how, Adam, your application of the plastic was not to put it up as it’s intended. There was a real painterly design method of making these crinkles inside of it, so that it had more texture than it may have originally been supposed to. I thought it was so exciting that you were misusing the material in order to create this other outcome.
Adam: Yeah, that we weren’t going for the smoothest, and therefore most adhering application. That had to do with getting excited by the way that it caught light when it was wrinkled, the glistening, watery effect, and the kind of skin-like quality. It was very compositional. We thought a lot about where to put the wrinkles and how many to put. I’m remembering another reason that we got really excited about the wrinkles is that the more textured and glistening and wrinkly the plastic was, the more crystal clear the dancers were. The madness of the dancer’s costumes, their skin against this glistening, very textured, total atmosphere meant that you could see them perfectly, like bodies floating in outer space. I thought that was so nice. So that was a very important part of the wrinkling.
Alexa: I watch a lot of old Hollywood sound stage dances, like Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, and they’re always on these huge, colourful fields where the lighting pronounces the figure. I think in an indirect way, like that’s what the green did. It was really exciting to be able to have this background foreground situation that had an effect on the dancers, like the sound of the crunching and the popping, but it was like doing such work to let the dance be itself.
Sam: It’s interesting, because I wasn’t even thinking about the sound stage, but obviously Singing in the Rain with a lamp post and having the blue background is fantastic!
Alexa: Yeah, it’s really kind of absurd or tonal shifts of these kinds of themes. And I think the logics are all quite similar, and that’s how they all fit together well!
