ORIGIN | SOURCE

a screendance attending to issues of care, time and place, cohabitation, and structural transparency.

dive deep with Em + Sofia

In our studio practice, we like to interrogate the notions of productivity that have been instilled in us by our culture, the field, and our teachers. Sometimes we go to the studio and we don’t dance. Other times we do, but spend most of our rehearsal time laying together, talking, watching videos of work we like, or arguing. Maybe twice during the process of making a given work will we have a magical rehearsal where we dance non-stop for at least two hours and everything feels effortless. We are learning that these magical rehearsals and these “unproductive” rehearsals are both valuable ways of being together in the studio. There is a rigor in deeply listening to the needs of ourselves and the work, and in not forcing logic, sense, or traditional forms of productivity. This permission allows for a different kind of ease and ability to dive into a project thoughtfully with patience, love, and our whole selves. Because of our indulgence in states of distraction and refusal, our works are usually made in spurts. We like to create situations which require us to present something before we and it are ready. When we show fresh material, we learn so much about it immediately.

We also like to engage in a practice of un-silencing. Our dances tend to be physically vigorous and we choose to allow ourselves to make sounds and communicate verbally as we dance them. This is an improvisational score that sits on top of our works. Un-silencing allows us to be further present (together) as performers. It mobilizes the voice and instigates communication, boundary-setting, need-stating, and other acts of verbalized care. Through this practice/score, transparency of intent, structure, and method are honored.

KK: One thing that stood out about your proposal was the idea of queer structures. How do you see that playing out in this work specifically, and in your work in general? 

S + E : In the dance world we engage with and in society, the vast majority of structures we are aware of and take for granted are born from capitalism, colonialism, and other oppressive systems. In this screendance and in our in-person dances, we make the medium of the work part of the content. This happens by acknowledging (both verbally and through movement) that we are filming or that we are dancing or that we are on stage or that there is an audience. This work didn’t just come to be; it was made. Just as every form and practice has been made. And if something has been made, it doesn’t have to be the way that it is. And if it has been made, it reflects the ideals of the person(s) who created it. Are these your ideals? Are you questioning why you do what you do? This kind of acknowledgment and transparency of structure, form, and circumstance is essential abolition work. We do not pretend that we don’t know we are performing or that we don’t know that a camera is there. 

Our current research focuses predominantly on transparency and revealing of structures which are ways of queering existing performance and making practices. However, we have also always been interested in queer choreographies in a sense of dealing with ideas of orientation, futurity and world-building, ephemerality, and failure and mess in our movement invention, composition and crafting of moments. The beauty of queer dance is that all of these concepts listed above are deeply rooted in queer cultures and experience(s) while also being exactly what many contemporary experimental dance forms are all about. Queerness and dance are both broad, odd, and embodied.