The cam-girl hurls themself at an inflatable mattress, striving to break free from digital intimacy. The solitary woman wraps herself in a decorative rug, escaping into the imaginative world of cinema. The kid glides across the stage in his parent’s rolling office chair, confronting the loss of childlike nostalgia along the way. These characters are meant to represent our biological response to perceived isolation, both the longing and avoidance of connection, and the overall mechanisms of loneliness. Through everyday objects, spoken word, and abstract movement, choreographer and director Mamie Green explores the paradoxical forces that govern our hyperconnected digital world in the full-length premiere of VOLTA Collective’s Loneliness Triptych.
“It’s just very human,” Green said at a coffee shop across the street from her studio rehearsal space in Highland Park. “We can all relate to the feeling of loneliness.”
In our post-pandemic, technology-obsessed age made up of pixelated screens and AI chatbots, isolation feels like something we still haven’t fully processed and will continue passing down generationally. As humans, we have a biological need to interact, hug, touch, connect. But we hide behind screens, gradually losing the ability to. Now, more than ever, Green feels the urgency to explore this concept through live performance.
“The crux of so much of my work is that tension between desire and longing for intimacy, for connection,” Green said. “Loneliness Triptych is my take on thinking about loneliness that as a society, as a culture, we are experiencing more and more.”
Excerpt of “The Cam-girl” from Loneliness Triptych at the Wende Museum. Choreography by Mamie Green. Performers Mandolin Burns and Lily Lady. Photo by Uriel Fernandez.
VOLTA Collective formed during the pandemic. As theaters shut down, Green found herself creating work that was site-specific. The distinct challenges that come with creating such works are having to consider performance through an immersive lens, in which audience members are often able to interact with and walk through the space, while giving up control of day-of conditions. This performance at the New Theater Hollywood will be quite different: it’s front-facing, in a small black box theater (usually intended for theater plays), more controlled, and uses a much smaller cast.
“There’s something that right now feels really prescient or important to me about crafting something where you can really just watch it and it has to live on its own, has to stand on its own,” Green said.
Earlier this year, Green presented shorter excerpts of Loneliness Triptych. First at the Brand Library in the Spring, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in June, and most recently, at the Wende museum. The full-length multidisciplinary work will premiere two weekends at New Theater Hollywood Oct 24-26 and Oct 31-Nov 2 at 8:00pm, featuring an original score performed live by Japanese American multi-instrumentalist & composer Dylan Fujioka, writing by Stephanie Wambugu, Lily Lady, and Sammy Loren, and performances by Bella Allen, Mandolin Burns, Anne Kim, Raven Scott, Ryan Green, and Ryley Polak. Creating work with multidisciplinary artists, especially non-dancers, is a crucial and special aspect of Green’s creative process. Each artist brings something new and necessary to the work.
“Every single one of my works is so reliant on who’s in it,” Green said. “I’m infatuated with the performers, and I want to use what they are bringing.”
Her creative process is shaped by the artists and creators she interacts with. For example, she met writer Lily Lady during a social outing one night. The awe she experienced when she saw them perform SESSION, a three-act play about two sex workers and their friendship co-written and directed by Lady and Siena Foster-Solits, inspired an entire scene in the triptych based on Lady’s experiences as a “cam-girl.” During rehearsals, working with Lady on movement inspired an entire exploration of counterbalance and weight sharing. The ways in which Lady interpreted and moved with Green’s guidance was hyperspecific to Lady and informed what became of the scene.
“I was like, ‘I want to work with them, they’re really cool.’ And so, I would have never made this piece, I would never have made ‘The Cam-girl,’ if I was really sanctioned in meeting only dancers,” Green said.
Excerpt of “The Döppelganger” from Loneliness Triptych at the Brand Library. Choreography by Mamie Green. Performer Anne Kim. Photo by Skye Schmidt Varga.
Loneliness Triptych plays out in three vignettes that together serve to convey a collective experience of isolation: “The Döppelganger,” “The Cam-Girl,” and the “The Kid.” In the first few moments of the piece, the audience experiences dancer Bella Allen slowly rolling herself up in a small decorative rug. The carpet unfurls. We delve into this crafted world of cinema, where a lonely woman escapes to – infatuated with the characters and lives she sees on screen. Two dancers reveal her emotional mindscape through movement, narrated by a monologue written by Stephanie Wambugu and Sammy Loren.
“The way that art resonates with me is the transcendent of the ordinary or the transcendent of the mundane,” she said. “I think that’s what excites me about dance and live performance in general, you don’t have very much materials. You don’t have high tech…but often what hits me hard is when it’s just bodies and space.”
The set design is limited to everyday objects that Green found secondhand: a decorative rug, a foldable metal chair, an inflatable mattress, and a rolling office chair.
“I like the performance to be in conversation with the world that we live in,” she explained. “Mundane objects are metaphors. They become metaphors by the interaction through text, through movement, through touch.”
Excerpt of “The Cam-girl” from Loneliness Triptych at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery. Choreography by Mamie Green. Performer Cacia LaCount. Photo by Kacie Tomita.
In “The Cam-girl,” the space becomes a small make-shift bedroom, inspired by poet Lily Lady’s personal struggle with sex work and “digital intimacy.” A large inflatable mattress serves as a vehicle for the performers to hurl their bodies at, blanket and hide themselves from the world in, and of physical labor a cam performer delivers for her clients. During one especially poignant moment, the performers attempt to embrace one another, yet the bed blocks this biological act of intimacy.
“It’s a pretty literal metaphor: two performers are trying to hug each other, but there’s this big, awkward plastic mattress in between them,” Green said. “I love the awkwardness of that… We keep trying to get to someone, but we have this ridiculous object between us.”
As the triptych unfolds, it moves from rigid and narrated to abstract and open, breaking free from constraints. In the final vignette: “The Kid,” dancers Ryan Green and Ryley Polak circle around the space in choreography that feels improvisatory, blending acrobatics with dance, jumping and sliding, floating, swirling, and flying.
While reflecting on the tension build-up that erupts within Loneliness Triptych, Green compared it to her own creative process.
“Something that I keep coming back to is a realization of making dances and making work, making art is like my spell against loneliness,” she said. “Creating. It’s my favorite thing…I love being creative with people, it’s an intimacy.”
Mamie Green. Photo by Asato Lida.
Green choreographs to explore and unpack deep psychological questions she is curious about. She works concepts out in her head – not to uncover the answers – but to dig deeper, to sink her teeth into them. For Green, Loneliness Triptych doesn’t exist to solve our loneliness epidemic, but to ask questions and provide a kind of release for herself and for the audience.
“I never like to tie it up with a bow….things are complicated, messy … things often degrade in the worlds that I build. … They break open, they degrade,” Green said. “There’s some kind of release, and even emotional release that we go through as a viewer and performer…almost catharsis.”
VOLTA Collective presents Mamie Green’s Loneliness Triptych Oct 24-26 and Oct 31-Nov 2, 2025 at 8:00pm at New Theater Hollywood. For more information and to purchase tickets, please visit: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/newtheaterhollywood/1890064
For more information about VOLTA Collective, please visit their website.
Written by Polina Cherezova for LA Dance Chronicle.
Feature image: Rehearsal of “The Kid” from Loneliness Triptych. Choreography by Mamie Green. Dancers Ryan Green and Ryley Polak. Photo by Polina Cherezova.