2025 Master of Fine Arts in Dance: Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis (MFAEIP) Graduate
Indigo is a digger for, and bearer of, treasures—fragments of knowledge left behind by avant-garde artists over the past century. They gathered a wild weave of voices, methodologies, and propositions from those who came before, crafting a new tapestry of ideas that gently invites the curious passerby into the poetry of everyday life and the potential of sensing as deeply as playfully. From this broad and resonant field of influence, Indigo wrought an opera—not the kind we are accustomed to, but one unfolding within a plastic construct, where performers navigated the thresholds of reality from within and without, the spectator becoming a witness—trusting that those ghosts rise in the process.
At the heart of this work lies a compositional method they developed—a kind of creative map or “matrix”—that draws from a multitude of performance practices, theoretical concepts, and poetic sensibilities, bringing them into dynamic conversation. This matrix became the foundation for the experimental opera And you ghosts rise blue, created in collaboration with a dis/embodied collective, embracing the idea of layered presences—some real, some imagined—communicating across boundaries of time, life, and death. Alongside the opera, Indigo created a Reader: a hand-crafted art object that functions as archive, artwork, and manifesto, gathering the resonant voices and artistic lineages that informed the process. Their research ultimately suggests, and ultimately demonstrates, that multiplicity, embodiment, and agency can serve as powerful tools for composing—or choreographing—movement, relation, community, and time itself.
—Michael Kliën
Professor of the Practice of Dance
Duke University Dance Program
Indigo Cook’s research focuses on contemporary performance practices of Western experimental art in the 20th and 21st centuries and their application to interdisciplinary creative processes. This compositional approach draws on scores, methodologies, and poetics across a field of disciplinary practices and weaves them together into a scaffold from which to build new creative work. Performed collaboratively, the act of sourcing and scaffolding within a matrix of diverse disciplines and voices requires the creators to navigate and experiment together with concepts of translation, multiplicity, embodiment, and agency. As an artistic methodology, this approach offers the possibility for richer, deeper, polyvocal work. As a collective practice, it can serve as a heuristic for language and community building.
Indigo’s thesis aimed to experiment with this compositional methodology in the context of their own art-making practice through the composition of an opera: And you ghosts rise blue. Written as an experimental pasticcio in three acts, And you ghosts rise blue wove together movement, sound, and light to open a rift in the space-time continuum and call in voices past and future, real and unreal. The voices – sounding alongside a collaborative collective of dancers, musicians, poets, actors, and visual artists – formed a ghostly chorus with whom we sang of the ephemeral, the infinite, and the im/possible.
And you ghosts rise blue was built alongside and in conversation with a host of embodied and disembodied voices – both material artistic collaborators and immaterial spectres of lineage, influence, and poetic inspiration. It was a rewarding and humbling process, and Indigo is deeply grateful for their artistic community, their primary advisor Michael Kliën; and their thesis committee members Jingqiu Guan and John Supko.
Indigo Cook is a dancer, percussionist, and interdisciplinary artist from Salt Lake City, UT. Their work focuses on contemporary performance practices in the experimental and avant-garde realm, and they are passionate about collaborative creative processes and community arts engagement. Indigo received their bachelor’s degree from Westminster University studying percussion performance and their MFA in Dance: Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis at Duke University. While at Duke, Indigo was a Graduate Arts Fellow with the Kenan Institute of Ethics, a Graduate Assistant with the Laboratory for Social Choreography, and a proud member of the Duke New Music Ensemble, in addition to collaborating in a wide range of community arts projects and events.
Indigo’s work – described as “an outstanding philosophical multimedia collage” by the Utah Review – has been presented at the Utah Arts Festival, Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival, Salt Lake City Performance Art Festival, 801 Salon, Vu Electronic Music Symposium, Westside CultureFest, and loveDANCEmore. Indigo is the director of the Salt Lake-based Interdisciplinary Arts Collective, and they work as a grant writer for Moab Regional Hospital and the festival director for ARC: Art for the Recovery Community in Moab and Salt Lake. They relish any opportunity to listen deeply, move wildly, and play with time.
The Master of Fine Arts in Dance: Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis (MFAEIP) is a two-year, full-time, terminal degree program grounded in Duke’s interdisciplinary approach. This program encourages research that responds to urgent global issues and joins critical conversations both within and beyond the arts.
