Both classically trained dancers, Mamie Green and Megan Paradowski connected over their shared desire to transcend the limits of dance performance. Together they founded Volta, a multi-disciplinary dance theater company with a mission to disrupt conventional notions of dance by blurring audience lines and incorporating non-traditional mediums.

Their most recent venture, SALT, is a fiery, hyper-sensory 21st-century reimagining of Euripides’ Medea. Directed by the two and written by Sammy Loren and Ellington Wells, the show features an ensemble of actors and dancers who shift the audience and split them into two: One to witness Jason’s side of the story, and the other to witness Medea’s. Scored live by musicians Melissa Achten and Eli Klauser, and featuring edible food installations by chef Heidi Ross, the show is an immersive, hair-raising playground, leaving audience members in hysterics over which side of the story to believe.

I got to chat with Mamie and Meg about their process behind creating SALT and the inspiration behind their approach to dance theater.

The world of SALT is so immersive and intricate. Where did the initial idea come from?

MAMIE: We've been really obsessed with the Greek tragedy Medea, and specifically Euripides’ version of it. So it started with the text. We were influenced by the Pina Bausch lineage of dance theater, so bringing in a narrative that feels really compelling is something we wanted to work with. Medea lends itself really beautifully to a lot of the themes we were already thinking about—female rage, hysteria, and reimagining this woman’s story and telling it through a contemporary lens.
This was also our third iteration of Medea. We performed the first in Berlin, and the second, titled MILK, was in Chinatown here in LA.

MEGAN: On top of the text, we were really interested in collaborating with artists across mediums to make something that's very rich in a sensory way for viewers. We love creating immersive performances and we've worked a lot with sound artists and dancers, but we wanted to push that even further. We worked with a scent gallery that created custom scents for MILK. Taste was the next thing we became interested in. Then we discovered Heidi Ross, who created the food installations [for SALT]. From a performance aspect, we were really interested in merging mediums across performers. We had two actors dancing and our dancers acting.

Dance is at the center of SALT, yet all these other mediums flow through it. I feel that’s very rare to see. Dance often seems to be what’s supplemented to tell a story, but with dance as the centerpiece, it changes the way viewers experience it. What inspired you to incorporate other mediums?

MEGAN: Something that Mamie and I initially bonded over when we first met is we wanted to make contemporary dance, which historically hasn't been super accessible, accessible to people who might not otherwise experience it. Traditionally, you either know about contemporary dance or you're interested in a specific choreographer, and that's how you learn about shows.

MAMIE: Or you're a dancer.

MEGAN: Totally. So we were both on the same page about how there are all these other audiences who might enjoy dance but don't know about it, or haven’t experienced it before. That's something that’s really beautiful about incorporating these other mediums. All these people are potentially seeing dance for the first time, or seeing food art for the first time. Blending those worlds is really exciting for us.

MAMIE: And to your point, the way that we work is so collaborative from the beginning. We really tried to create it to be woven together as it's happening. We never wanted to separate the text from the dance from the food, etcetera. We really wanted it to feel like every single piece was part of the same world and had equal value. Of course, we're a dance company, so that is always our main world, but we wanted to push what it meant for us to be choreographers. We’re always trying to push the boundaries. We came from a traditional dance background of simply performing dance onstage, but now we’re asking questions like: Can we do this with scents? Can we do this with food? Can we use actors? It was definitely a bit of a challenge and risky in a way. But pushing those boundaries is what Meg and I always keep coming back to.

The act of eating while watching a performance where there is no stage and everyone's moving around you made me feel so vulnerable, like I was up for grabs as an audience member. It felt like a ”body-first” experience, where there was no separation between audience and performer. Was that your intention with the food, to include the bodies of audience members as a form of storytelling?

MAMIE: We were having conversations from the beginning about making the audience complicit in this story, in this woman's unraveling. By having the audience blur the line between performer and audience member through food, through movement, through guiding people through the space, we wanted to integrate and also challenge them. Asking them how are you involved in this story of society destroying a person? Which is ultimately the story of Medea for us.

MEGAN: One of the things that first connected us with Heidi, the food artist, is that she views eating as movement, which is so beautiful and connected to dance. It kind of takes dance off of this pedestal and makes it accessible. Audience members are moving while the actors are moving, too. That was a big factor in setting up the food installations. One of them came down on baskets and audience members had to reach up and grab it. Heidi was thinking about that as well, the dance of how people are going to eat the food.

There are several versions of Medea being told in SALT. There's Jason’s version and Medea’s version, but the musicians also tell an overarching story, as well as the dancers. What was your process in layering these stories and fusing them together?

MEGAN: Directing each of those components could be difficult because we wanted to leave room for everyone's voice in the project, but we also wanted to make sure that they were all in close conversation with each other. So we worked in tandem throughout the entire process with each collaborator. We checked in very frequently over the course of the process and were inspired by one another.

MAMIE: Meg and I direct the whole thing, so we are guiding our copllaborators. The actors, the dancers, the musicians, and Heidi were all discovered through an open call and then we brought everyone together. We were constantly managing everyone, but they had freedom within that. It is our directorial project and then everyone else is contributing their talents.
There’s also an element of distortion. There are so many different sides, right? You hear Jason's side and you hear Medea’s side. There is no truth. There is no one truth in our world. You have to ultimately decide or not decide. We're not trying to create a moral judgment at the end of the day. It's more complex than that, as is real life. Moving the audience around and distorting their perspective is a way for us to talk about truth and objective truth.

It was interesting how even when the audience was split into two, there was simultaneously something happening in the center of the room. The entire room was in motion so you think, maybe I’ll divert my eyes, maybe I’ll walk around. You had this freedom as an audience member, a sense of agency. As performers, how did that change your relationship with the audience?

MAMIE: That's the magic of immersive performance. There is no offstage for us, right? If you were to do something on a stage, often there’s an offstage. Then you turn it on when you come on. From the beginning, Meg and I have been doing performances in these kinds of untraditional spaces, which don't have an offstage. I found that it actually was this cyclical thing, where you don't have to rev yourself back up because you’re always in it. You become so immersed in this world and it aids in this fully embodied character study that you're doing. You never actually drop out of it because you're always in it. It's not so much of, I’m on stage now, I'm off stage, I'm performing, I'm not performing. It’s like you really have to commit fully. It’s exciting. It’s my preferred way of performing now, I think.

MEGAN: We create each of our pieces to be experiences for the viewer, not in a proscenium way, but in a very connected way that allows for agency. I can't even describe how fun and exciting it is to be a catalyst of that experience. To know that you might be watched or not, at any given point. We love to be watched as performers, so it's this thrilling sense that somebody might catch what you're doing at the right time. That makes it so dynamic and visceral to be inside of it. There's a real awareness of the audience but also a commitment to the experience. We know you're there and we know that you might be watching. That’s what's fueling the story at the same time.

Right, you leave with a very nuanced vibration that you were inside of something. Then with you as performers, not being able to turn it off per se, it adds a charge to the room that feels inescapable, almost uncomfortable.

MAMIE: Everything you're saying is basically conversations that we've had for a very long time. We were talking about voyeurism and how we wanted this to feel like you're able to see behind closed doors, like watching a family going through a divorce or how you go to a dinner party with your friends and then go home and you don't know whether they got into a fight. You don't know if they made love. How do you get that vision into something that you shouldn't necessarily be seeing? We were thinking about Jason and Medea as these sort of hosts that are taking you into their home for a dinner party or something like that.

Considering both the original idea and the finished product, did anything surprise you about how SALT was executed?

MEGAN: I was so blown away by the level at which each of our collaborators across mediums executed their piece of the performance. The level of design and detail and care blew me out of the water in a really beautiful way. Everybody was so committed to achieving this vision. It really came to life in such a beautiful way.

MAMIE: The surprise [for me] was that Meg and I literally dreamt this up in our apartments, [asking questions] like, what if the audience was split into two? What if they were walking this way? What if they were eating this and hearing this? We were literally just on our computer typing it out and creating a full on fever dream. This has never ceased to be a surreal experience for me because something that's in your head might not actually work in terms of practicality. So I think that that's always a risk and a surprise.

Did anything surprise you about the way the audience experienced it?

MEGAN: Audience interaction is always surprising no matter what. You just never know how people are gonna respond when you're moving them through a space, whether they'll feel comfortable taking the food, or whether they'll want to dance with you.

MAMIE: If they’ll hear things. If they’ll see things. If they’ll eat things at the right time. That didn't always happen. The audience on the second night ate things at different times, for example. But that's part of the magic of it.

MEGAN: And the first night they were really timid. You just never know. We leave as much room for that unexpected quality as we can, but it's still surprising every time we do the show. This piece also had a level of flexibility because we knew we were gonna be moving audiences around. Even the length of the piece was probably drastically different each night because of the way people move their bodies and feel comfortable in the space.

MAMIE: The large number of people, too. Having over a hundred people in the space was really challenging to make sure everyone could hear, taste, and see the performance.

Looking towards the future, are there any other new mediums that you want to experiment with?

MEGAN: I’m hoping we’ll work with some kind of visual artist sometime soon. There was a lot of set design with the food, but we haven’t used any sculpture as set design or costuming. Working with a painter could be really cool, too. But we’re also looking to use some of these senses again. We’d love to work with food again. We’ll probably keep working with sound artists because it lends itself so well to dance.

MAMIE: Maybe some kind of opera-esque thing. But yeah, I also want to dive deeper into what we’ve already been doing and not get into the trap of always having to do the new craziest thing. Actors were a new thing for us and I feel like there’s so much more room there. I could work with that for a long time.

MEGAN: Text is always rich to work with, and I think that helps with the component of making these shows accessible. There’s something for everyone to follow. We’re all familiar with storytelling, so that’s a universal way to connect audiences.