Offer Me Solutions, Offer Me Alternatives, and I Decline is an 11-minute multimedia dance performance created through a collaboration between Amanda Ellis Hamp, Bobcat Ranf, and Stewart Skylar Copeland. Combining movement, projection, live media, and experimental technology, the work explores haunting, uncertainty, and connection within a destabilized world. The piece premiered as part of the New Mexico Dance Hackathon performance i/o on August 2, 2025, at ARTSLab at the University of New Mexico.

Offer Me Solutions, Offer Me Alternatives, and I Decline opens on a completely dark stage. There’s a scrim at the front, a large projection screen at the back, and a tent onstage. That’s it. No visible light. Bobcat is lying in the middle of the stage, moving slowly, but Bobcat is barely visible because the space is pitch black. The sound of crickets fills the room. I’m positioned to the left of the stage with a computer, controlling the media and the live processing. Projected onto the scrim is a shimmering white point cloud, generated in real time by two Orbbec Femto Mega LiDAR cameras aligned to create a single 3D model of the stage. I navigate a virtual camera through that model, so what appears on the scrim is this almost holographic, shifting point-cloud view of the space.

Hamp enters into this darkness. The point-cloud camera drifts to hover behind Hamp’s shoulder, like a ghost following them. Hamp turns on their headlamp and suddenly Bobcat is illuminated on the floor. After a few seconds, Hamp switches the lamp off, moves to another location, and repeats this action. Hamp does this in four different spots, punctuating the darkness with brief, localized bursts of light. Then Hamp leaves the headlamp on and begins to walk slowly around Bobcat, using the beam as a handheld spotlight to trace the contours of Bobcat’s body. We call this section “the tracing.” Hamp illuminates Bobcat’s limbs, edges, and angles, almost drawing Bobcat into existence with light. At a certain point, Bobcat turns on their own headlamp, looks up, and catches Hamp in the beam as Hamp stands in front of the scrim. A song kicks in, and the point-cloud projection fades out, leaving the two of them dancing together in near-complete darkness, their headlamps the main visible elements cutting through the space.

This duet lasts about three to four minutes. Hamp and Bobcat move through the space with their headlamps on, creating shifting pockets of visibility, overlapping beams, and fleeting glimpses of each other. Toward the end of this section, they come to stillness, facing each other, switching their lamps on and off. It looks almost like a wordless Morse code, signals sent across a small, uncertain distance. Over this, I start playing audio clips of Hamp and Bobcat talking about ghosts, fragments from a conversation we recorded earlier in the process. As that plays, they make their way into the tent. The back projection comes to life, revealing 360° video of them inside the tent, performing a kind of séance. The words they speak in that video are actually lyrics from “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” repurposed as ritual text. The video then smash-cuts into an edited montage of them jumping and flinging themselves around inside the tent, captured from the 360° cameras’ perspective so it looks chaotic, almost unhinged, the tent thrashing, bodies colliding with the fabric from the inside.

While this frenetic 360° montage plays on the screen, the real tent onstage slowly rolls across the floor. Hamp and Bobcat then begin to deconstruct it, breaking it down piece by piece until it collapses into a simple pile of fabric. The projection ends as the tent is reduced to nothing but material. The performance ends there: lights down, ten minutes in total. What began as a quiet, almost invisible body in the dark has become a haunted, improvised structure that then unravels into its raw components.