untitled VHS (working title)
"...at times prompting memory of Twin Peaks scenes."
-Audience
Untitled VHS is an encounter with the past, in real-time and unscripted. At its core is a simple gesture: Kayla selects an untitled VHS from her family’s archive—without knowing what it contains—and meet its images in real time, responding through an improvised performance. What emerges is a shared confrontation between then and now, where memory is not recalled but re-embodied.

Through the live collision of body, voice, recorded image, and presence, Untitled VHS becomes an intimate rite of exposure and transformation. The work excavates what the body remembers when the mind cannot—or will not—and asks what it means to face our history in communion, with exuberance rather than privately in shame. As the past flickers forward, time softens and rearranges itself: younger and future selves coexist, family trauma is placed on display not for confession but for circulation, resonance, and potential repair. 

Ever-shifting, Untitled VHS treats performance as a site where the meaning of the past is not fixed but renegotiated in the present moment. Can the future alter the past? Can witnessing be a form of care? Can sharing family archive–unedited, unresolved–open space for collective healing as much as personal reckoning?

Seeking presenting partners.
PRESENTATIONS
August 2025: Minnesota Ballet Performing artist Series, Studio 4, Duluth, MN (work-in-progress showing)

PRESS
Best Bets, Duluth News Tribune, 2025
This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. Kayla is a recipient of the Individual Artist Equity Grant, made possible in part by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and culture heritage fund.
additional Photography by cc Boyle Photography, Adrian Steinbach, bill cameron, ASHLEY DEREN