ALT MODE: a collaboration between RYAT and Kate Watson-Wallace

Alt Mode, as in: alternate modalities (working title), is a body of musical works written by composer/producer RYAT (Christina McGeehan), reconstructed into a performance that integrates dance, live electronic music, video mapping, interactive media and set design. Directed and choreographed by Kate Watson-Wallace, and composed and designed by RYAT, the work asks questions about what it means to be a woman on stage, radical female presence in a popular context and equity within the form. In this work, RYAT and Watson-Wallace continue to explore how they wear their identities, working with themes of doubleness, drag, the other, pleasure and melancholy, as sources of power. They explore ecstatic states, state-shifting, and pleasure as revolution, as ways to propose new futures.

Ever evolving in music and art, RYAT, comes from the land of meditative avant jazz improvisations, classical analyzing, hip hop sampling culture, electronic beat making, sound processing, multi-medium performance and visual experimentation. Currently residing in LA, RYAT (also known as Christina McGeehan) composes for film and dance, and produces conceptual albums. RYAT has been commissioned by organizations such as Annenberg for PIFA festival and has collaborated with groups like Nadastrom, jazz artists including Taylor McFerrin, King Britt, Cinematic Orchestra and Mark Guiliana, and visual artists such as Steve Teeps. RYAT enjoys working with many different kinds of artists in all mediums to create futuristic sound and visual experiences.

Kate Watson-Wallace is a choreographer, director, and visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She creates experimental performances for the stage, site-based locations, and music videos. Works include: CAR, an audience for 4 audience members who sit inside a moving vehicle, STORE, a performance installation inside an abandoned mega-store, Everywhere, a participatory online dance experience, Mash Up Body, a collaboration with ManMan drummer Christopher Sean Powell, and Perform Me, an interactive performance and installation where all audience members are also performers. She has received numerous awards for her choreography including: two Map Fund grants through Creative Capital and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts in Choreography, among others. Watson-Wallace co-directs the interdisciplinary performance company anonymous bodies with Jaamil Kosoko. She has toured internationally as a performer, choreographer and teacher.


Jennifer Archibald is the founder and Artistic Director of the Arch Dance Company and Archcore40 Summer Program. She is a graduate of The Ailey School and the Maggie Flanigan Acting Conservatory where she studied the Meisner technique. Ms. Archibald has choreographed for the Atlanta Ballet, Ailey 2, Cincinnati Ballet, and commercially for the New York Knicks City Dancers, as well as chart listed singers and actors. Her 2016 commissions are for Cincinnati Ballet, Ballet Memphis, and Kansas City Ballet. Ms. Archibald’s works have been performed at many venues including, New York’s City Center, Lincoln Center, The Kennedy Center, Aaron Davis Hall, Jacob’s Pillow Inside|Out Stage, Rialto’s Off The Edge, and in Times Square. Ms. Archibald was a participant in Ailey’s 2013 New Directions Choreography Lab, and was 1 of 4 choreographers selected as a choreographic Fellow for the Lab under the direction of Robert Battle. She is also the choreographer for “Seven,” a biographical work of Olympic athlete Jackie Joyner Kersee, commissioned by St.Louis based MADCO dance company. Arch Dance Company has been presented on two National Performance Arts Grants and was the Artist in Focus dance company presented by the Jamaican Performing Arts Center. Ms. Archibald is a lecturer for Hip Hop Dance and Culture for Columbia University’s Barnard College Dance Department. Internationally she has taught in China, Ecuador, Brazil, Sweden, Russia, Slovenia, and Canada. This year, Rhode Island College, Howard University, Fordham Ailey, and Balettakademien will present her work for their artist in residence programs.