Dance

Motion Capture: The Quarantine Salsa

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THE QUARANTINE SALSA

Choreography, Dance, and Lighting all collide in this motion capture edit and render to explore not only the current state of quarantine but exist alongside the movement exploration of Latin forms. Vamos a bailar! Enjoy!

Made by LROD

©LROD

NYC: Livable Futures: Climate Gathering and Performance Ritual

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Livable Futures is headed to New York City to kick off our national tour. We will start at Barnard College at Columbia University’s Motion Lab from January 12-17, 2020. Read more about this event here.

Recently, I was awarded a Livable Futures Grant for collaboration. I was asked to respond to three questions on the community page. Visit the Livable Futures website here.

Here are my responses:

What makes more livable futures for you?

For me, a pursuit to re-imagine justice, resiliency, and love against the current oppressive or destructive ways of living would be a start in making the future livable. I believe it is crucial to create a realm of care, ethics, and compassion to work towards balance in our overly consumptive world. These liberal acts help to reconstruct/heal dilapidated structures in our social, economic, and industrial ways of living but prioritize these acts within the environmental sphere. As an artist, I think creating performative/experiential environments in a community of co-creation kickstarts the imagination needed to unlock the potential of our future.

A livable future responds to crisis, injustice, and inequality.

A livable future is continuously adapting.

A livable future makes and holds space for all.

A livable future is a possibility manifested through imagination.

A livable future redefines freedom.

A livable future is not always polite.

A livable future is transparent.

A livable future thrives in equity.

A livable future redefines love and care.      

What are you reading, viewing, listening to right now?

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (2017), Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (2019) by adrienne maree brown

Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology by Jennifer A. González

Black Brown & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (2009) edited by Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley

Dawn (2012) by Octavia E. Butler

On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein

The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (Ahmanson-Murphy Fine Arts Imprint) by Ronald Rael

What practices are sustaining you?

Sustaining my practice is daydreaming, hyper creativity in co-creative environments, performance as protest, and ritualized self-care.

Sun’s kiss on my skin

The desert

Aesthetics in environmental design

Home

Community

Daily improvisation

Mi Familia

Napping

Sustento

Artmaking in all its capacities

Conversations

Immersing into books/movies/shows

Truth

The moment when I am told something is impossible

-LROD 

©LROD

Field Review

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©LRODFor my MFA field review, I read sources and viewed films that canvas the field of studies related to my final project to deepen my inception. One of the most relevant resources I read was Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement because it outlines a Chicana art-making structure I can identify choreographically within my project. A choreographic strategy, perhaps. Lineage. This book goes into depth about using identifiers such as Chicana/o and makes visible the precautions one might need towards not essentializing the identity, but moving beyond. The next book, The Surrealism Reader: An Anthology of Ideas connected many ideas because it draws from the minds of surrealist painters, sculptors, and fabricators and compiles their theory, poems, and process notes alongside their artwork. The spider-web of information resonates loudly because the surrealists were not all dreaming about surrealism, investing in surrealism, and consuming surrealism to produce surrealism. No, these artists were living and breathing while putting forth efforts to contribute to areas of phenomenology, perception, haunting, sciences, politics, and social constructs. These areas outside of surrealism better inform their art.

I am aware of the lineage.

I am active in the conversation.

I am prioritizing presence.

I am re-imagining the alternative.

Countering the perspective of The Surrealism Reader is another book called Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. In this book, the experiences, histories, artworks, and theories of Frida Kahlo, Remedios Varo, Dorothea Tanning, and Leonora Carrington are all captured and interwoven. The relevance here is the detour away from the inner circle of surrealist ideology which tends to be driven by patriarchal standards and erasure. Surrealism itself is the ability to continue to expand and shift ideas so that they do not remain fixed. I can use this as I begin to engage more with the choreography of the final project. However, I tend to be drawn more toward expanded perspectives and transgressed perspectives, so we will see how much of the surrealist inner circle maintains its presence. I do like the way the information is organized and accounted for in this book while directly speaking to the art produced.

On the other side, the viewings most influential were Yanira Castro’s Court/Garden and Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealers. Castro’s work encompasses the designed choreography, audience participation, and media installation and sections the piece into three parts. This work is relevant to my project because of its attention to the audience’s role in the work. However, by focusing here I am not neglecting my attention to costumes, choreography, and media, but if the audience’s design is not woven into the main components then my outcome will be not so subtle. One would not recognize this device, however, the subtlety of the design makes this experience magical. Out of my research so far, I can weave three different levels of engagement to support my project and involve the audience in different capacities.

Lastly, Sleep Dealers is like watching someone depict the future. While I can only hope Rivera’s future does not come to pass in the era of trump politics. This film is powerful to watch, noting, a sci-fi narrative constructed through the Latina/o perspective. This film at times was hard to sit with because of how real it seems with the current political USA/MX tensions. An important part of the film unites Mexican and Mexican Americans to overcome the USA’s oppression. This is not a common narrative and was refreshing to see.

As someone who has wondered much of this world existing in-between-ness the word—affinity—comes to find its importance. For even in this global trade of information there are migrations of movement, bodies, and materials, speaking to the larger ideas. Beyond the dualism. Even this I believe Donna Haraway wrote about already. So what is performing art doing?

Citations:
Ades, Dawn, Michael Richardson, and Krzysztof Fijałkowski. 2016. The Surrealism Reader: An Anthology of Ideas. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Chadwick, Whitney. 2002. Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. New York: Thames and Hudson.

González Rita, Noriega Chon, and Howard N. Fox. 2007. Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement. Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Castro Yanira. 2014. Court/Garden. Vimeo

            https://vimeo.com/145859179

Rivera, Alex. 2008. Sleep Dealer. DVD. 90 minutes. Maya Entertainment.

SHORTLIST (email LROD for LONGLIST)

©LROD

Obscura by LROD y Artistas

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A short dance-film inspired by Frida Kahlo’s The Wounded Table. I am not only thinking about rituals, offrendas y mi Familia but also what is the camera’s (me essentially) relation to the people in the frame.  I wanted to produce vibrant color in juxtaposition with darkness or the feeling of darkness. Creating worlds where inter-generational populations are included as well in the dance canon. Adelante!

Made by LROD y Artistas
Music: “Death Bed” by Alex Somers (Liminal Remix)
(I do not own the rights)

©LROD

The Internal | Connecting | Creative Process

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Date: October 26, 2017

Two levels in Creative Process v.210

Mapping out a creative process to connect two parts of my research resonating with Inside the Room and Outside the room branches. Inside the room’s design is led by the Experiment thread, while Outside the room reflects the Research thread. I was compiling this information from a word bank created in the Grad Composition class with Professor Susan Van Pelt Petry and peers. We then each took the word bank and made a visual map of our creative process.

For my challenge, I only used each word one time and practiced this assignment utilizing a present-moment embodiment. Meaning, that I only allowed myself one piece of paper with no option to have a do-over. Utilizing this assignment as a challenge I was aware of my devising boundaries. This project created a meditative space for me to sit with my pen to the paper, and process my process. Which usually feels meta, however, this project was calming while being informative. Most of my reflections have happened through a stream-of-consciousness or analytical essay, so it felt good to move towards a tangible medium to flush out information.

Further noting the attention and weight of each word resonating within my body I continue to let these words reconfigure inside my body. A digital roadway on the frontier of interconnectivity pulsing, sparking, and transferring connections that re-wires and retracts information before surging it back out again.

The system is operating. 

I recognize these maps are abundant within my body, and mind and are the containers to hold, organize, and connect information used to make co-creative spaces. They are roadways of information. Living knowledge intrigues me as I delve into the internal self of producing art. Maybe the cyborg self is emerging underneath the surface below my skin and responding to the familiarity of the motherboard. While the image below relates to this emerging, I examine the depths and intricacies that are possible in overriding.

Cyborg Self Reflection | Awakening

In trying to navigate my cyborg self-relationship I am drawn to this quote by Donna Haraway a professor, consciousness, and feminist scholar, “Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not based on original innocence, but based on seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other” (Haraway 2016, 55). My journey over the past five years has sent me plunging into words, writing, and language – preparing me for my conversations, arguments, and discourse today. Sometimes my consciousness rejects my impulse to respond, and my unconsciousness delivers connectors to reconnect broken bridges of thought. Tracing the map above throughout my creative process enables me to redirect how I am thinking, feeling, and exploring the material.

Responding to a recent visit by Vida Midgelow who presented at the DSA inaugural Scholarly Conference and is a Professor in Dance and Choreographic Studies at Middlesex University London says, “Coming into language is a significant process through which experiential, material and emergent forms of knowledge can be foregrounded, processed and shared” (Midgelow 1994). Previously, I rarely spoke my stance or dared to share the perspectives that ran rampant in my mind.

The information comes to me as this digital space allows me to write about these developing curiosities that are awakening. Identifying as an “other,” I do claim the tools to unearth my potential as a choreographic researcher, scholar, and free-thinker to engage in practices that move humanity towards change. Structures, rules, and traditions can be broken and reconfigured to make manifest new ways of operating that enhance artistic ability, connect technology and humanity, and revolutionize the central core of art-making.

Free Motherboard Vector Art

The above image is how I imagine the framework for my discourse of choreographic research operating–or what it looks like to strategically choreograph, basically my mind on paper. The motherboard vector art is part – object – abstract – micro-processing –  unit –  internet integrated – modern – non-binary projects – future technological advances – daydreams.

 

Works Cited

Haraway, Donna J. and Cary Wolfe. 2016. Manifestly Haraway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. https://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed October 25, 2017).

Midgelow, Vida. and Jane Bacon. 2014. “Creative Articulation Practice (CAP).”                                      Forthcoming in Choreographic Practices. 5[2]                                                                                  https://www.academia.edu/9956868/Creative_Articulations_Process_CAP_  (accessed October 25, 2017)

©LROD

Intermedia || Merging Reflection

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Archive Date: December 14, 2017

In collaboration with my colleagues, we set out to produce a digital double investigation. Our goals included examining the Double as Reflection, suggested by Steve Dixon’s “The Digital Double” (2004) essay which I reflected previously on here. From this project, we realized that we were attracted to textures, and themes, and discovered multiple ways to find a reflection at different levels of technological entanglement. Take a moment to skip through.

One challenge that we encountered was in using the video feedback loop, top-down camera, projection, and lighting to gain different perspectives of the space, it appeared that the movement we created needed to shift per examination. Incorporating The Isadora program, live sound, and lighting to bring these portraits together merged with the movement and use of the material was essential and grounding components to this project.

The digital double in the sense of reflection draws me to the consciousness that the real body maintains throughout the performance. I found it interesting that most of the time the real-life performer needs to witness the digital in reflection. Dixon notes, “This has been exacerbated by paradoxical rhetoric of disembodiment and virtual bodies, which have turned ideas of corporeal reality full circle by the claim that the digital body has equal status and (authenticity) to the biological one” (Dixon 2004, 24). During this study, the concept did cross my mind of the equality of images, and I found myself drawn to both bodies at different times. I begin to speak about this on this page with Agent Ruby and the sense of awareness of consciousness through AI that has developed.

For this project, I appreciated this viewing:

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Fase (1982) is so simple from a current technological standpoint but is still so mesmerizing to watch. Here light, shadow, film, and movement create the dance – enhance the dance. One of the parts that most interests me is at 7:18 of this film. Noting that from the first half of the film space transforms and they are now performing on their shadows in a fully saturated blue space.

Glancing into the future I was struck by this digital double. While the concept is simple seems simple what transpires is exhilarating.

This is CO: LATERAL (2016) by Joao Martinho Moura

Moura’s work with the digital double here is literally electrifying itself. I appreciate how in this work the dancer is in the dark while the emphasis is put on the double.  The bold lighting against the blackened stage gives a stark contrast platform for the double to stand out.  In a sense this double take on a dominant force on stage and provides a strong presence in the work following along with Dixon’s models.

The most important experience I had from this study is the merger of technology and body with intention. Questioning why /how we implement technology into the work was at the forefront of this study to think about as a group. The question: How we collaborate with technology? Continued forward into our next studies.

Sources:

De Keersmaeker, Anne Teresa, and Michele Anne de Mey. 1982. “Fase.” (Film) Director Thierry de Mey. Music Robert Reich.

Dixon. Steve. 2004. “The Digital Double.” New Visions in Performance: The Impact of Digital Technologies. Ed. Gavin Carver. Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger. Print

©LROD