Eleventh International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Dance is a form that is both felt sensorially by its performers and seen visually by its watchers. This study analyzes the choreographic process of Agua Viva, an hour-long performance that interrogates the ways in which non-human actors, specifically water, are active contributors to subject-formation practices of self and identity. This research turns to the choreography of oceans, natural water systems, and the deep-sea floor as potentially radical sites for reimagining our terrestrial future(s), and examines the unassuming and often invisible ways in which waters systems are entangled with notions of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Emerging through site-specific improvisation, video, field work, sound design, experimental writing and ecological data collection, this project questions what gets identified as “technology” and the social, political, and ecological consequences of engaging with these systems. This work proposes that dance has the potential to be both time-capsule and time-machine: calling forth the histories, training, and forms of the bodies present, living and moving in the ephemeral present, and creating a world that may look similar to the one we currently inhabit but is almost always more resemble of science fiction in form, indicative of a future world that is yet to fully come. Time, space, identity, and form all become entangled ecologies, summoned together to be experienced in a particular way for for a particular duration of time.