Six Quiet Dogs (2025)

Responding to the birth of her daughter and the death of her mentor, composer Alvin Lucier, Levine gave herself a two-year assignment to pay attention to her world through sound—sirens and pauses in conversation, clanging radiators and stalled cars, police batons on bodies, artillery shells on apartment buildings. In Six Quiet Dogs, Levine shapes these observations into a record of the intimate, overlapping experiences of a birth and death through attention to sound. From this meditation, she has spun a night of 80s-inspired dancing, golden eggs, lullabies about Andy Warhol and just intonation, and intimate entanglements with unspectacular household items that happen to make spectacular sounds. 

Premiered at Target Margin Theater, October 23-26, 2025
Created by Abigail Levine
Music: Paula Matthusen
Design: Karen Boyer
Lighting: Shana Crawford
Dramaturgy: Tim Reid
Dancers: Martita Abril, Anna Azrieli, Julian Barnett, and Kristopher KQ Pourzal
Producer: Amanda Hameline

The performance is accompanied by a chapbook, Words Begin as Sound, containing texts written during the work’s development, edited by Andrea Kleine and designed by Michael Reardon.

Press

“an ingenious, imaginative, dryly witty writer” whose choreographic images are “at once funny, fascinating, and disturbing.”

Brian Seibert. Review: In ‘Six Quiet Dogs’ Ordinary Sound Gives Way to Poetry. The New York Times.

“In each moment, we are invited to listen as if for the first time.”

Noa Rui-Piin Weiss Silence is Imagined, Not Perceived. The Brooklyn Rail.

“To say Levine is a dance maker is to neglect all the other modalities she brings to her works, including text, drawing, and sound.”

Candice Thompson. Interview: Listening to the World with Abigail Levine. Fjord Review.

photos by Maria Baranova and Whitney Browne.