Child’s Play:
Liz Magic Laser and Cori Kresge

Child’s Play is a participatory workshop followed by a conversation conceived by artist Liz Magic Laser and choreographer Cori Kresge in which they blend their research on oratorical gesture and embodied persuasion with dice-based chance procedures drawn from Cori’s work with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

Together they explore the hand gestures politicians use to project authority. Using oversized dice lent by the Merce Cunningham Trust, participants generate combinations of gestures and movement qualities through a playful study of political body language. Exploring how Cori’s prompts—fast and slow, circular and angular, firm and soft—shift the meaning of each gesture, the workshop digs into how the same motion can read as commanding, seductive, reassuring, or defensive.

Following the workshop, Liz and Cori will lead an extended conversation about the tension between uninhibited child’s play and the rehearsed ways leaders perform conviction in public life, reflecting on the Skowhegan School’s camp-like atmosphere, where artists can suspend their usual responsibilities and experiment freely, often returning to a more uninhibited mode of creativity and collaboration.

Child’s Play grew out of Liz’s experience with the School, first as a participant in 2008 and later as resident faculty in 2025. During the summer program, Liz and Cori led an Oratorical Gestures workshop based on their ongoing research, and Cori also taught Field Dances (1963) in Skowhegan’s Flex Performance Space before the class took it outdoors into the field. The event at Skowhegan NYC is open to everyone and emerges from the overlap between those two workshops and from Cori and Liz’s long-running collaboration on gesture.

Liz’s research into oratorical gesture began while studying how contemporary politicians perform authenticity on camera. In works such as I Feel Your Pain (2011) and The Digital Face (2012), she examined the rise of emotionally expressive political performance in the age of reality television and teleprompters. The Digital Face featured Kresge and fellow Cunningham dancer Alan Good performing gestural choreography with rigorous mechanical precision.

Since 2012, Liz and Cori have continued to develop this inquiry together through somatic practice, adapting François Delsarte’s nineteenth-century system of oratorical gesture and combining it with contemporary media training, wellness culture, and performance art.