Lyric (monument to loss): work-in-progress, 2021-2022

This work-in-progress dance will occur as both a site-specific performance event and a video.

The last two years have been rich with collective and personal losses which rise from realities of embodiment: disease, violence, the chaos of climate. The scale of the body, or bodies made collective, defines the urgency of our social experiences, our personal peace, our actions in the world. Right now, this truth seems particularly inescapable.

Dance often fails, in my opinion, when performed outdoors, so easily dwarfed by the natural or constructed world that surrounds it. The scale of the moving human body fails without a frame, just as the human body fails – its meaning distilled, finally, to the framework of our social connections and history. This work embraces the poetics of this failure of scale and wonders “How might one make a monument out of movement? How might one use the ephemeral to memorialize our precarity?”

In exploring these questions, the dancers move through space, coming in and out of proximity to one another. A 25-foot fabric installation and the supple movement of their costumes, subject to the wind, serve to stabilize the “performance” space in an unpredictable way, placing the dancers in relationship to the natural elements.

monument (n.)

late 13c., "a sepulchre," from Old French monument "grave, tomb, monument," and directly from Latin monumentum "a monument, memorial structure, statue; votive offering; tomb; memorial record," literally "something that reminds," a derivative of monere "to remind, bring to (one's) recollection, tell (of)," from PIE *moneie- "to make think of, remind," suffixed (causative) form of root *men- (1) "to think." Meaning "any enduring evidence or example" is from 1520s; sense of "structure or edifice to commemorate a notable person, action, period, or event" is attested from c. 1600.