A Dance for a Time Being

Dancer’s bodies, like trees, accumulate wisdom and knowledge throughout years of training and living—a wealth that is overlooked because dance is popularly seen as an artform of youth. With this project, I intend to make the gains of age visible through the art of movement.

In A Dance for a Time Being, I will begin by interviewing dancers to discuss their aging process as dancers and as people. The conversations will inform the dancers’ movements as well as the sound score. We will work with everyday movements and gestures of walking, running, climbing, rolling, reaching, sliding, touching, and many more. The raw video recordings will be created in public space and then restaged in a studio with a clean and clear background.

The second phase will incorporate augmented reality (AR) technology. Here we want to explore the idea of what we are becoming or how we may imagine ourselves in the future. Using AR tools we will create an alternative reality where dancers will choose an avatar to serve as a double of their imagined self.

Funds raised from this campaign will be used to develop the first two of the six videos. It will pay for dancers’ rehearsal and performance, for video artist capturing and editing, composition, and avatar design. In addition, the funds will support the purchase of signage and permits to display the QR codes of the final dance-films in a public place.

To me, dance has always been a way of connecting with people in order to better understand the world and myself in it. From the beginning of my long career as a movement artist, I have been drawn to the transformational way dance can be employed to create and empower community. For example, since 1985 I have shared dance not just on stage but in public spaces. During my tours, besides dancing in theaters and opera houses, I have danced in prisons, cemeteries, galleries, juvenile detention centers, parks, and city streets. To transform a community, I believe that we need to liberate dance out of the confines of the theater and to bring it into public view in public sites with community. I feel liberating dance liberates us and connects us as a community.

And today, I see that people need spaces to contemplate mortality. I lost my father in 2019 and we have lost so many during the pandemic. I want to be able to support and learn from others who are growing older and facing losses because that is a shared future of growth and legacy.