Photo courtesy the artists

Toogie Barcelo + Joe Berry, Sound Body
Saturday May 31, 2025 | 3PM-4:30PM

Followed by an audience exchange

ABOUT SOUND BODY

Toogie Barcelo is currently developing Sound Body, a new evening-length duet with longtime collaborator and multi-instrumentalist  composer Joe Berry. The work explores transformation as a nonlinear, sensory process through a blend of movement, sound, and circular motion. Drawing from practices of breathwork, somatic listening, and sound therapy, the piece examines how intuition, memory, ancestry and energy move between bodies and spaces.

Rather than a fixed choreography, Sound Body unfolds as a live dialogue between sound and movement, with scenes structured around emotional states and shifting frequencies. The work features a rotating circular platform that physically embodies spiraling internal change and challenges linear performance structures. This project builds on themes from Toogie’s previous work Metanoia, while expanding research into trance states, hypnosis, and psychoacoustics as choreographic tools.

ABOUT TOOGIE

Teresa “Toogie” Barcelo is a Cuban-Spaniard, nonbinary choreographer, director, and movement artist known for blending dance, ritual, and surrealism into immersive, emotionally resonant work. A first-generation American, their practice explores transformation, communal care, and unseen forces through nonlinear storytelling and hybrid movement languages. Grounded in both classical and street techniques, their work weaves improvisation, structure, and presence to give form to memory and transformation.

Known for seamlessly adapting across disciplines, Toogie works across the music industry, film, live performance, commercials, and movement direction, with choreography credits including Alicia Keys, Dua Lipa, Harry Styles, Khalid, Miguel, Sabrina Carpenter, and Tove Lo. Their work has received international recognition, including being named one of Billboard’s Top 12 Most Iconic Choreographers of the Decade for Dua Lipa’s “New Rules” and earning an MTV VMA nomination for Best Dance Video for “Electricity.”

Toogie’s choreography has been presented at The Music Center, Pacific Design Center, LA Theatre Center, and Art Share LA, among others. They also choreographed the Lighting of the Sails at the Sydney Opera House with Andy Huang. Premiering June 2022, Metanoia, an evening-length dance theatre work directed and devised by Toogie. An exploration of metamorphosis and the cyclical nature of grief, Metanoia is a collective meditative experience materialized through performance.

Toogie is committed to movement as an embodied archive. Their process emphasizes care, ease, and a deep engagement with the body’s ability to hold history and shape new futures. This commitment comes to life through wiggle room, an improvisational class experience that integrates breath, sensation, and presence, offering space for release, reflection, and creative inquiry. As an artist-in-residence at the Center for Provocative Thought, Toogie continues to expand the role of movement as a tool for reflection, healing, and transformation.

The LAX Micro Fest is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture. Los Angeles Performance Practice is also supported, in part, by The Mellon Foundation, The Perenchio Foundation, and the California Arts Council.