FIRST THE COLORS / THEN THE HUMANS is an interdisciplinary dance theater creation examining the intertwined histories of domination, care, and world-building. Drawing connections between centuries of control over female bodies and the human management of animal life, the work explores how systems of knowledge, protection, research, and stewardship often emerge alongside practices of containment, extraction, and exclusion.

At its center lies a question: who is permitted to belong within the worlds we create, and whose labor sustains them? From the domestic sphere to the laboratory, the farm, the zoo, and the archive, the work traces the often-invisible forms of maintenance that uphold social, political, and ecological orders. It considers the figures tasked with caring for others—keepers, handlers, mothers, attendants, custodians, and workers—whose labor preserves life while frequently remaining unseen.

Created in VIM VIGOR's signature aesthetic, blending rigorous physicality with bold theatrical expression, the work investigates the fragile boundary between care and control. What distinguishes protection from possession, observation from surveillance, stewardship from domination? As humans classify, contain, nurture, breed, study, and manage other lives, they simultaneously construct ideas about value, belonging, and hierarchy that shape human societies as profoundly as they shape relationships with non-human worlds.

Moving between histories of scientific inquiry, animal husbandry, colonial collection, domestic labor, and feminist resistance, the work reveals how worlds are continuously built through acts of maintenance—through feeding, cleaning, repairing, tending, watching, and waiting. These practices, often dismissed as secondary or mundane, become the foundation upon which entire systems depend.

Rather than imagining care as inherently benevolent or domination as absolute, the work inhabits the tensions between them. It asks how dependence, vulnerability, responsibility, and power coexist within every living system. Beneath the structures that separate human from animal, keeper from kept, ruler from ruled, lie shared conditions of embodiment: the need for sustenance, shelter, recognition, connection, and survival. In illuminating the labor that makes worlds possible, the work invites audiences to reconsider not only who belongs within those worlds, but also who has been carrying them all along.