Land/Escapes (performance)
In collaboration with Zavé Martohardjono
Premeire AUNTS x Rockaway Edition, August 25 & 26, 2018
PRESS: Reviewed in The New York Times
Land/escapes is a collaborative investigation of internally prompted physicalities, complex geographical identities, and vast landscapes, alongside of a questioning of our personal and collective relationships to land, displacement, and decolonization. During our durational improvisation, two figures progress through the landscape in slow-motion; their sculptural costumes stream in the wind as amplified nature sounds emanate from their bodies. An altered sense of time and space prompts a heightened awareness of spatial and architectural detail. The resulting performance is a platform for contemplation, an aperture for politicized being, and a nod towards the transformation of time, space, and place. Land/escapes stages embodied questions: How do we as performers acknowledge that space is NOT empty, NOT blank, NOT uninhabited, but instead filled with a vast array of histories and presences (including those pleasant, unpleasant, ambiguous, and/or unknown)? How can we engage with the historical, geographical, and visual complexities of landscape without simply demanding that the focus be our individual bodies? How do anti-oppression and decolonialist frameworks intersect with or disrupt somatic intelligences? How do we bring our bodies’ non-central nervous system’s knowings into conversation with social and political issues?