becoming sensor

Commision for the 2023, graduating class at the Dance Arts Institute.

To begin creating this work together, I was inspired by systems and patterns of emergence as they present themselves in nature; swirling starling murmurations, weaving herds of roaming animals, schools of fish and rolling repeating waves in the ocean – patterns endlessly cycling and repeating, each one unique and responsive. The systems at play in the work enact these images not as representational but experiential, as generative systems for improvisation. The structure of the work privileges an active dialogue between bodies as a mode of negotiating space, time and relationship together, an attuning to, and a reaching out to dance with. Following the work of writer and activist Adrienne Maree Brown on emergence, where “what we practice at the small scale sets the pattern for the whole system”, I am curious about the potential for sensing one another and moving with this sensibility, establishing a pattern which plays out ‘in the world’. We lean into dance as a mode of embodied thinking, as a practice of paying attention and attending to the present moment, negotiating and adapting. We explore how dance opens “expanded capacities for what bodies do together, for what ground they break, for the desires they unleash, the debts they place in circulation... all point to a more ambitious realization of this potential for moving otherwise” (Martin 9). I would like to thank and acknowledge the dancers for their incredible artistry, and generous collaboration in the development of this work.

Title ‘becoming sensor’ is inspired by the work of Dr. Natasha Myers Randy Martin. Between Intervention and Utopia: Dance Politics. transcript Verlag, 2011.

Performers and collaborators: Katie Ayer, Peter Bannister, Amelia Brown, Rajvi Dedhia, Abby Hanson, Mai Leuning, Ellen Moore, Ella Parsons, Camryn Rieksts, Isey Schaffer-Hooper, Maya Santos O’Keefe