Published on October 13, 2025
‘with your sweet frangrance.’ Photo: Travis Emery Hackett
Hivewild Presents
with your sweet fragrance
Artistic Director: Katherine Maxwell
Dancers: Robyn Ayers, Felix Bryan, Julian Grubman, Hardy, Céline Maillard, Sean Rosado, Kira Shiina, Ragin Smith, Madison Wada
Scenic Designer: Sarah Karl
Lighting Designer: Jackie Fox
Composer: Paul Maxwell
Costume Designer: Caitlin Taylor
New York Live Arts
September 18-20, 2025
Katherine Maxwell, Artistic Director of Hivewild, is not one to shy away from the value of human connection. with your sweet fragrance, her evening-length work at New York Live Arts, presents an opportunity for us to sit with how we can deepen our relationships to each other and our surroundings. She raises the question: How can we become tender with the Earth?
Hivewild in with your sweet fragrance. Photo: Travis Emery Hackett
The work’s opening, however, is anything but tender. Amid darkness, the audience sits in the acoustic hypnosis of teardrops falling into a pool of water. The stage is bare except for a thick sheet of crinkled plastic. The cast of nine performers emerge as a unit in cold white light and smoke. We hear the plastic crinkle as they stomp, flinch, and step barefoot on demi pointe, an effect which is simultaneously unsettling and satisfying. Maxwell creates the atmosphere of a nightclub in the performance space as the dancers rage in articulated unison to the booming, reverberating beat of Paul Maxwell’s score.
Hivewild in with your sweet fragrance. Photo: Travis Emery Hackett
As the group transitions offstage, Felix Bryan remains left behind, curled into a fetal position with their back to us. The image of Bryan’s still body sinking into a plastic void carries an eerie immediacy. They transition into rhythmic solo material in a state of isolated, melancholic wonder, starkly contrasting Maxwell’s ecstatic choreography in the previous scene. As Bryan mimes pulling something out of the plastic ground, the stage floods with bright lights from the downstage corner, casting a monstrous shadow of their figure on the opposite side of the stage—an image that somehow makes them appear more alone.
The story of an intense personal relationship surfaces when Madison Wada joins Bryan. The pair maintains intimate eye contact as they embrace and interlock their necks, torsos, and legs, only to burst into a wrestling match. As they fight to take each other down, the sense of angst between them, especially from the first row of the audience, feels genuinely passionate.
Hivewild in with your sweet fragrance. Photo: Travis Emery Hackett
Throughout the work, characters assemble and disassemble like pieces of a puzzle as they question how they fit in with each other, oscillating between resistance and embrace. The stage remains an open field of play for discovery, intimacy, domination, and rejection. One dancer, Hardy, seizes the stage in a game of manipulation and control: like a videogame simulation, her hands act as remote controls to command Bryan and Wada’s movements. When Hardy’s hand goes flat, the dancers suddenly drop to the floor; when she raises her fingers, they desperately try to lengthen their bodies to the ceiling on demi pointe. As each cast member re-enters, Hardy’s strength and enjoyment of manipulation grows. Her facial expressions add an enticing expressive dimension as she rules over all the dancers at once. She smiles as if cackling and her eyes widen as the dancers anxiously struggle to keep up with her demands.
Hivewild in with your sweet fragrance. Photo: Travis Emery Hackett
A dynamic change of scenery occurs when the dancers collectively pull the plastic sheet away from the stage to uncover a field of grass along the upstage wall. The room immediately transitions from cold to warm, revealing a golden meadow in which the dancers break free of their collective choreography into their own personal worlds. Solos, duets, and trios intermingle as dancers levitate and glide through the field in the foreground and background. They suspend their bodies in the air for impressively long stretches of time, whether gliding through a lift or planted on one foot. Céline Maillard contorts her limbs, knees, and back at an accelerated pace, roaming across the stage with intense specificity. The soundscore continues to change tempo and dynamic, finally resolving in a calm passage of electric strumming.
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Hivewild in with your sweet fragrance. Photo: Travis Emery Hackett
As the cast comes together again, they run to each other in desperate embraces and cover themselves under the thick plastic sheet. Blended into one creature, all that we see is a large, writhing shadow that pushes and prods the plastic into new shapes, pierced by the light from flashlights the dancers hold within. As they find stillness, they find resolution to their collective turmoil.
At Hivewild, dancers are humans and the stage is the Earth. “with your sweet fragrance” invites us to ground ourselves in an opportunity to witness the experience of what it means to be human.
Hivewild in with your sweet fragrance. Photo: Travis Emery Hackett
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