WATERMILL, NY.-Linda Austin, a dancer/choreographer, and Caroline Woolard, an installation artist, will present Was that you or the house?, a collaborative performance rehearsal produced by cross-disciplinary dialogue. Using their Watermill residency as a "user-testing research laboratory for sculptural tools," Was that you or the house? will use pieces from the Watermill Collection as objects that serve as catalysts for actions of simple wonder. Austin's and Woolard's play and improvisation create unique encounters between dancer and object.

Linda Austin is co-founder and director of Performance Works NorthWest in Portland, OR. She has been making dance and performance for over two decades. Her poetic, unconventional works have been performed in New York at P.S. 122, the Danspace Project and the Kitchen, and in the Pacific Northwest at the Northwest New Works Festival at Seattle's On the Boards and at Portland's TBA Festival. In addition to fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (1992) and the Oregon Arts Commission (2007), Austin's work has been supported by the Regional Arts & Culture Council, The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, the U.S./Mexico Culture Fund (through Movement Research Exchange) and a Djerassi Artist Residency. Her most recent large-scale project was circus me around, a melding of movement, architecture and sound in a Portland warehouse last October. In September 2008, she presented a dance for the Lawrence Halprin-designed Lovejoy Fountain in Portland as part of a project bringing together music, dance, and landscape architecture to celebrate Anna and Lawrence Halprin's Portland legacy.

Born on an island off Rhode Island and based in New York, Caroline Woolard received her BFA from Cooper Union in 2007. As a Research Scholar at NYU and a Research Assistant at Mildred's Lane, Woolard investigates the construction of subjectivity in architecture, art and design. Woolard's interventions are presented publicly in the urban environment and have been affiliated with psychogeographic events like Conflux in NY, Cryptic Providence in RI, and Unoccupied Spaces in Montreal. Caroline Woolard is the recipient of Leon Levy Foundation grant and the Elliot Lash Award for Excellence in Sculpture. She has shown her work at the Newport Art Museum in RI, Jackson Gallery in GA, Oxbow Gallery in MI, and The Bruce High Quality Foundation in NY. The past year has been one of roof research and cloud sculpting, gravity defiance and void articulation.