Clapping for Nature (2024)

What does it feel like to clap for the soil, a tree, the sky? While our planet continues to warm from systems of capitalism, we can still celebrate and reconnect with these ecological communities in an effort to cultivate awareness and action on a collective scale.

Clapping is a contagious behavior, like a yawn or laughter. An individual clap soon becomes collective, prefiguring the type of responses necessary for halting the damage to our ecosystems. Clapping is galvanizing as sound and as action. When the individual claps, they announce and invite others into their sense of appreciation. When the group claps they affirm their sense of themselves as a collective, united by gratitude and celebration.

This outdoor, immersive dance performance attempts to restore our relationship with our local ecosystems through tapping into the radical present through a combination of performance and somatic practice.

sorry just seeing this (2024)

Our phones hold memories in data, photos, and apps. They track our steps and tell us where we are, who we are, and where we need to go. Yet the technology we have to connect us to each other has the potential to isolate us from the rest of the world. This work investigates the intimate relationship we have with these devices and our ongoing search to find one another.

we look away (2022)

Leigh was accepted into the Get What You Need (GWYN) residency in fall 2021. In their research, mover and performing artist Leigh documented the visible roadkill of West Philadelphia over a six month period. Through this work, Leigh rejects the notion of human exceptionalism and instead invites audience members to acknowledge the larger grief of human impact on the ecological landscape.

In Omnibus Requiem Quaesivi (2019 and 2020)

For several years, Leigh has collaborated with performer Laura Vriend. Through their collaborative process, they investigate grief through a series of iterative vignettes.