2025 Another Audience Artist
Imaginary Islands Imaginary Island is an experimental dance company based in Portland, Maine, co-founded by Kristen Stake and Hannah Kumaski (formerly Wasielewski). Imaginary Island lives in the waters of Casco Bay, home to the dance that can’t be erased. Influenced by the tribulations of Contact Improvisation, Keith Hennessy’s “fake healing” scores, the effervescent spirit of (d)ancestor Kathleen Hermesdorf, and Anna Halprin’s experiential community gatherings, the company is a lifelong dance process rooted in healing, grieving, and improvisation.
Kristen Stake is a dance-theater artist and mental health counselor whose work draws from somatics, postmodern dance, and the emotional-relational dynamics of ritual and memory. Hannah Kumaski is a dancer, performer, arts organizer, and somatic practitioner with a background in teaching, administration, and production—including roles with the FRESH Festival in the Bay area. Together, they bring an expansive view of dance as a vehicle for transformation and healing.
Imaginary Island will use the Another Audience residency to research a new work entitled Deep Time. This project dives below the surface of the landscape of You Are Going to Be Healed (our evening-length work from 2023) into the primordial embryonic fluid of existence. Deep Time embraces more-than-human elements by drawing inspiration from whale songs, embryonic fluid, timeless states of consciousness, and unexplored ocean depths as a portal to the cosmos—connecting human experience to vast timescales and non-human ways of being. By discovering new values, rhythms, and modes of expression as they interact with the natural world at the residency, Stake and Kumanski hope to learn more about how they can relate to humpback whales, ancient geological formations, and embryonic forms to inform how they embody this material during performance.
