Since 2020, Miles—co-artistic director of Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble (PETE)—had been dreaming up a theatrical presentation that would capture the way she felt when she first encountered Swiss photographer Robert Frank’s 1959 series The Americans, via an episode of The Daily, which noted their thematic overlap with that year's unstable summer. The high-contrast black-and-white images, taken by Frank in an attempt to untangle the “real” America from its manicured image, inspired her to draw a link between the respective powers of photography and the body as instruments of social critique. In her own words, she “started to see dance.” Conner Reed