Marla Phelan → BIRTH + CARNAGE [Reflection]

Photography courtesy of Tim Richardson © Licensed

It has been a week since the premiere of Birth + Carnage, Marla Phelan’s remarkable debut choreographed performance and installation, held from December 19–21, 2025, at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre in NYC. I attended the first performance, and it was a truly transformative moment.

I could have examined this while the event was fresher in my mind... or in my body, I should say. But I’ve been “processing”... and it’s also Christmas, so there’s a lot going on. I’d love to describe it to you, but words would flatten it. It’s almost degrading to reduce something so incomprehensible to a meagre synopsis.

Like meteors shooting through the night sky, Birth + Carnage was an ephemeral spectacle; as incredible as it was fleeting. Choreographed movement, immersive visuals, sound design, and lighting converged into something far beyond a traditional performance.

Rather than a formal review, this is a reflection on an extraordinary, transient experience that now lives only in memory.

I went into this show expecting something like a contemporary theatre performance, but what I witnessed could only be described as a miracle.

Seated in the historic, sold-out Ellen Stewart Theatre in NYC, my jaw dropped as I watched Marla and nine other dancers showcase the height of human artistry. Together, they moved with stunning physicality and purpose before a towering wall of abstract, allegorical visuals that weren’t responding to the performance, but were authored alongside it; created with intention to move in precise alignment with their bodies, the music, and the lights, everything unfolding with epic, celestial unity.

I’m lucky to call Tim Richardson, Marla’s husband, a good friend. I knew how hard he had been working to help bring this to life. He guided the visual direction with artists KSLR and Reinfected.me, helped shape the sonic landscape with James Newberry, and collaborated on the lighting with Devin Cameron. All of this set the stage for Marla to choreograph and channel what I can only describe as pure, physical, visceral human expression.

Birth… Carnage. What a fitting title. It was undeniably the birth of something—new life forming in real time—while also revealing the raw power and magnitude of the collisions required for life to manifest. I wonder if the ensemble realised they had become a conduit for something so much greater than themselves. This is what amazing art does: it reveals a channel beyond itself and lets us see past the veil... They achieved this.

The fusion of technical mastery, overwhelming sensory design, and impossibly powerful choreography was just fucking mind-blowing.

I walked out a changed man.

As an artist, I understand the effort, dedication, and sheer luck it takes to produce any work of substance, but this was beyond anything I could have imagined. The stars aligned, and under Marla’s adept hand, a crew of incredible humans came together to tell a universal, monumental story.

Birth + Carnage was both human and cosmic. In the end, those are the same thing, right? Physical. Alive. Something deeply inherent, spiritual, and existential was being expressed through living bodies colliding in real time.

Marla and Tim, wife and husband, didn’t just make a show—they delivered something into the world. It felt like their creation in the most human sense. Not a child, but an artistic legacy was born.

I must mention the extraordinary people who helped steward this work to life: Assistant Director Kelly Ashton Todd, Dramaturg Catherine Correa, Costume Designer Elanur Erdogan, Lighting Designer Devin Cameron, Stage Manager Emily Pathman, and Producers Yazmany Arboleda / The People’s Creative Institute, Cameron Sczempka / Polymath Production, Lisa Kjerulff, and Movement Museum. These were the hands and the minds that helped hold the performance, shape it, and support it.

Marla, Tim, and everyone involved achieved something truly transcendent. My congratulations go to everyone who helped bring it to life.

I felt privileged to be a witness, yet melancholic in the face of such awe and magnitude, knowing it couldn’t last. That familiar existential and emotional tension was already swirling inside me.

What unfolded wasn’t gentle or sentimental. It was elemental. It was collision, pressure, force; the same raw energy that fuses stars into existence and binds matter into form. It revealed the violent grace woven into reality itself, as Marla and her ensemble embodied the celestial and molecular carnage that creation requires at every scale.

And there I sat, transparent, stunned into my seat, fusing with the landscape as I witnessed greatness.

It felt sacred... For years, Marla has poured herself into other people’s visions. This time, it was her debut—her moment to let the magnetism move through her, not as a body in front of the work, but as a star within it. While Tim and their collaborators shaped the orbit, the space, and the world that held it, Birth + Carnage wasn’t just a performance. They created gravity... the force that pulls matter into meaning.

What remains now is my gratitude. Reverence. And the unmistakable imprint of having sat in awe as life and the universe condensed into one hour that felt like the apotheosis of human expression—redefining what I believed was possible.

Birth + Carnage set a new benchmark for what art can be…

What it should be.


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CREDITS

Choreographer + Director: Marla Phelan

Director: Tim Richardson

Composer: James Newberry
Video Artist: klsr
Video Artist: reinfected.me
Astrophysicist: Dr. Blakesley Burkhart
Lighting Designer: Devin Cameron
Assistant Director: Kelly Ashton Todd
Dramaturg: Catherine Correa
Costume Designer: Elanur Erdogan
Producer: Yazmany Arboleda, The People’s Creative Institute
Producer: Cameron Sczempka, Polymath Production
Producer: Lisa kjerulff
Producer: Movement Museum
Stage Manager: Emily Pathman

Choreographed in collaboration with:

Dancer: Damontae Hack
Dancer: Sydney Hirai
Dancer: Mizuho Kappa
Dancer: Eleni Loving
Dancer: Sayer Mansfield
Dancer: Meenah Nehme
Dancer: Marla Phelan
Dancer: Wyeth Walker
Dancer: Paul Zivkovich

Birth + Carnage is supported by the Simons Foundation’s Science, Society & Culture division. Developed with residency support from the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), New Directions Choreography Lab (NDCL) at The Ailey School, and Simons Foundation & Gibney’s Open Interval Residency Program.