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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.

Shannon Gillen is the artistic director of VIM VIGOR (US). She has created work across the USA, Canada, Central and South America, and Europe, with commissions for L.A. Dance Project, dance.films for BAM, New York Fashion Week, Danceworks at the Lobero Theatre, Gibney Dance Company, Hubbard Street 2, Resilience Dance, Over het IJ (NL), Jacob's Pillow Festival, Boston Dance Theater at the ICA in Boston, Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, b12 Festival at DOCK 11 (DE), Ruvuelo (Chile), Mainfranken Theater Würzburg (DE), Arts Umbrella (CA), the International Solo-Tanz Theater Festival in Stuttgart (DE), TIF Theater in Kassel (DE), and De Dansers (NL). She has been a Think Big choreographer-in-residence at Staatsoper Hannover (DE) and a choreographer-in-residence at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton. Notable festivals and venues where her work has been presented include Springboard Danse Festival in Montreal, New York Live Arts, Prisma Festival in Panama, Judson Church, PULSE Art Fair / Art Basel, Bryant Park, NYC's River to River Festival, Perry-Mansfield, and The Joyce.
Gillen's recent commissions include the Iceland University of the Arts in Reykjavík, the b12 Festival in Berlin, the Institute of the Arts Barcelona (ES), Michigan Movement Performance Projects (M2P2), Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center for Gibney Presents in NYC, and the Arthur Miller Theatre (US). Recently, she created new works for the choreographic platforms LUZ – SITGES in Spain and MAVERICKS for b12 in Berlin. In 2027, Gillen will create new works for the University of Limerick in Ireland, Elon University, IAB in Spain, and the Power Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Gillen is an Associate Professor of Dance at the University of Michigan. She is a graduate of The Juilliard School and earned her MFA from Tisch School of the Arts, NYU.

Katherine Kiessling is a dancer and recent graduate of the University of Michigan, where she earned dual degrees in Dance and Computer Science. She officially joined VIM VIGOR in 2025 and has since performed internationally in the company’s productions THE LONG FALL, MOTHERLOAD, DRACULA, and COUNTDOWN. She has also assisted the company throughout its physical practice and choreographic processes at the University of Michigan Department of Dance, the b12 Summer Festival, the Institute of the Arts Barcelona, Iceland University of the Arts, and Michigan Movement Performance Projects. Most recently, she served as choreographic assistant and rehearsal director for Shannon Gillen’s new work with Zagreb Dance Company. Additionally, she assisted Gillen with creations at Michigan Movement Performance Projects, b12's MAVERICKS platform in Berlin, and LUZ – SITGES in Spain. In July 2026, she returned to Berlin, where she assisted in Gillen’s workshops at the annual b12 Festival.