At Side Hustle Gallery's inaugural performance, choreographer Madeline Hollander brought her new work COUNTDOWN (2025) to the modernist pool house of Kelly Wearstler's Los Angeles home. Performed by eight AquabatixUSA synchronized swimmers, the piece transformed the 1934 James Dolena-designed site into a living mechanism for measuring time: gestures looped, reset, and advanced in precise aquatic sequences, each movement marking anticipation and return.
Drawing from legendary director Busby Berkeley's kaleidoscopic choreographies, Hollander recast his language of synchronized spectacle as a spatial study, revealing choreography itself as a system for keeping time.
The swimmers wore Kamperett's Selwood One Piece, a suit chosen for its sculptural clarity and high performance—a clean, uninterrupted silhouette that holds in motion. In black, the Selwood became a defining element within Hollander's shifting geometry. With music by Ceilia Hollander and curation by Job Piston, COUNTDOWN approached the pool as both stage and instrument. In this setting, the Selwood's sculptural simplicity sharpened each formation, tracing the line of the torso and the synchrony of each gesture.