Clapping for Nature
Site-specific performance | Participatory movement | Ecological practice
What does it feel like to clap for the soil, a tree, the sky?
Clapping for Nature is an ongoing, site-specific performance practice that explores applause as an expression of ecological appreciation, collective connection, and care. Through movement, somatic inquiry, and participatory performance, the work invites audiences to slow down, pay attention, and celebrate the natural environments around them.
Clapping is contagious, like laughter or a yawn. A single person's applause can ripple through a group, transforming an individual gesture into a collective act of gratitude and celebration. By redirecting applause toward the more-than-human world, Clapping for Nature challenges conventional ideas about what deserves recognition and invites participants to reconsider their relationships with local ecosystems.
Rooted in the urgency of ecological crisis, the practice creates space for both celebration and grief, exploring how seemingly simple acts of attention and appreciation might cultivate a deeper sense of connection, responsibility, and collective action.
Clapping for Nature has been performed and presented in public and natural spaces throughout Philadelphia, including Cobbs Creek, Concourse Lake, and FDR Park, as well as through events associated with the Philadelphia Fringe Festival and Leah Stein Dance Company.
sorry just seeing this
Performance | 2024
Our phones hold our memories in photos, messages, and data. They track our movements, tell us where we are, and guide us toward where we need to go. Yet the very technologies designed to connect us can also distance us from one another and the world around us.
sorry just seeing this explores our intimate relationships with these devices and the tension between digital connection and physical presence. Through movement and performance, the work examines how technology shapes our attention, relationships, and ongoing search to find one another.
we look away
Performance and ecological research | Get What You Need (GWYN) Residency, 2021–2022
Developed through the Get What You Need (GWYN) residency, we look away explores ecological grief, human exceptionalism, and our relationship with the more-than-human world.
Over six months, Leigh documented visible roadkill throughout West Philadelphia, attending to the often-overlooked lives and deaths of animals sharing our urban environment. Through this research and performance, the work challenges human exceptionalism and invites audiences to confront the ecological consequences of human activity.
we look away asks what it means to witness lives we routinely overlook and how acts of attention might create space for grief, recognition, and care.
dwell
Site-specific performance | 2021
Presented to an intimate audience at Leigh's home, dwell explores memory, loss, and the boundaries between domestic and public space. Audience members watched from the porch, catching glimpses of the performance through partially opened windows and doors.
Drawing on personal memories of losing a family home, the work investigates the spaces we inhabit as children and the ways these environments shape our sense of belonging. Through movement, gesture, and the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, dwell examines the home as both a place of refuge and a boundary separating us from the outside world.
The performance invites audiences to consider how domestic spaces hold memory, how we carry those spaces within us, and what happens when the places that once sheltered us are lost.
In Omnibus Requiem Quaesivi
Collaborative performance | 2019–2020
Developed in collaboration with performer Laura Vriend, In Omnibus Requiem Quaesivi explores grief, loss, and the ways we navigate experiences of mourning. Through a series of iterative performance vignettes, the artists use movement, gesture, and experimentation to investigate the shifting emotional and physical landscapes of grief.
The work evolves through an ongoing collaborative process, revisiting and reimagining material to explore how grief transforms over time and how it is expressed, carried, and shared through the body.
In Omnibus Requiem Quaesivi
In Omnibus Requiem Quaesivi (pars duo)
Headlong Performance Institute & Leah Stein Fall StudioWorks
Performance, choreography, and collaboration | 2019–2020
In 2019, Leigh completed the Headlong Performance Institute, an intensive program focused on experimental performance, movement, and collaborative creation. Their residency culminated in and the day gathered in, a collaboratively developed performance.
In 2020, Leigh participated in Leah Stein Dance Company's Fall StudioWorks, contributing as a choreographer, collaborator, and performer. As part of the program, they created pep, a one-person virtual pep rally that explored the possibilities of performance and collective encouragement in a time of physical isolation.
and the day gathered in (2019)
pep (2020)