Mapping bodies as moving places, this writing responds to three performance works: 8 Counts into the Void by Jessica Keeling and Hayley Gawthrop, pool notes and (mis)alignments by Aysia Tse and H(annah) Kryworuchko, and un(tidaled) a collaborative performance workshop led by Jasmine Liaw. Through interpretations of co-authorship, this writing invited the artists to contribute to this project by sharing inner registers of their process. With their own offerings intermixed within Liaw’s response to their works, the writing explores how queer embodiment, nonlinear experiences of time, and emotional labour reshape understandings of performance → by noticing relational topographies of bodies in space.

Focusing on fractals, each performance challenges the nature of audienceship through the creators’ presence as performers in the work. This understanding of ‘fractals’ asks us to reconsider how what happens at a small scale can reveal, disrupt, or generate patterns within a larger system. What is intimate can become structural → what is embodied can extend beyond the individual body. Each project engages a distinct movement practice, foregrounding what it means to be in practice → understanding the body in relation to site. Artistic and personal relationships are seeds to their movement research and somatic storytelling → becoming a place where the artists seek to understand rather than be understood. Witnessing the work, the audience is drawn into the artists’ own processes of unworlding. Each chosen performance site amplifies quiet, entrenched systems of power, and through the artists’ choreographic systems, their performances deconstruct and unlearn the resonance of these pressures meshed within these sites that ultimately affect bodies and being. 

I recall Camille Sapara Barton’s notes on somatic practice with pressure in The Decolonial Centre Podcast. Here, Barton discusses how certain somatic strategies can be seen as a luxury rather than the soil, helping prepare the growth of cultures that not only resist oppressive infrastructures, but also align with our values while under this pressure. With this understanding of somatic practice in mind, this co-authored writing considers the ways in which the performances featured here cultivate the capacity for imagination required to see and create something distinctly nourishing that relieves and at the same time acknowledges → the void; sites of training; the screen. By doing so, each work reveals the humanness of performance: the joy of an honest body, its intimacies, and capacities for presence. This resonates with Jack Halberstam’s notion of unworlding → moving away from glossy, utopic futures and toward the unfinished conditions of the present. The utopianism Halberstam critiques is not a neutral imagining of elsewhere, but one shaped through oppressive hierarchies, carrying with it the violences of racism and ableism. To unworld, then, is to remain with what is already here: to notice the infrastructures that hold us, to unsettle the worlds they produce, and to make room for other ways of being together. In this sense, the works do not offer escape from the present, but move within its messiness, allowing performance to become a site for feeling, questioning, and collapse.

This relationship between scale and system is carried across the works, from performing within an industrial shipping container, to a public institutional swimming pool, to the two-dimensional space of a virtual meeting room. Each site becomes a microcosm of the larger systems the works are concerned with → how bodies are permitted to move, occupy space, and be seen. 

As a piece of writing, being bodies with fractal syncs functions both as a communication piece → a public platform → and as an intimate zine. It becomes a way of publishing ephemeral art-making: documenting practices, questions, and embodied experiences → rarely archived in this way.

She’s beauty and she’s grace, she’s spiraling into space.

Within Boombox’s shipping container venue space, Jessica Keeling and Hayley Gawthrop’s 8 Counts into the Void establishes a generative world entangled by demonstrative aesthetics. Maneuvering and re-negotiating our understanding of the performing body, their choreography is built with the curiosity of re-imaging the bodily politics of endurance, existence, and external pressures tied to girlhood and femme social containers. 

Through what they call “girlipop existentialism,” 8 Counts into the Void allows the body to exist in both comedic and physiological relief. The work lives in constant memory tapping, but at the same time, Gawthrop and Keeling’s intelligently constructed kinetic assemblage of materials in space invites us to question whether it is a world at all. Their performance straddles disjunctive interior realities of what the intensity of the void could feel like by leaning into vigorous ideas of play, tenderness, and kinship entangled within emotional labour.

We’re not staring into it, so much as giving it a side-angle glance 👀

The void

We’re not falling into it so much as leaping and spiraling ecstatically 

For every lurch of dread, there is an equal twist of gut-wrenching joy.

This world we co created came from a desire to find glimmers amongst the grey, to sing our hearts out, to celebrate our love and sisterhood, to sweat and shake and laugh, hard, to take joy very seriously. 

Eight Counts into the Void grew out of a process that was deliberately kind, hopeful and lighthearted. My non-negotiable heading into creating it was that I would keep a sense of innocence and spontaneity as an anchor. Maybe a glimpse of our relationship as a piece? 

 When Hayley and I started creating in the box, all we really knew was that we wanted to dance and sing together. We kept saying “lets just do cool moves and make nice sounds” as though that was some kind of rebellion. It turns out that it is. We spent days improvising, talking, laughing, and trying on wild ideas without needing them to land. In the end, what fit fell out of us.  

Rejecting fixed structures, the format of Gawthrop and Keeling’s work creates the space for human and non-human elements to carry relational capacity and affect → shifting between weight, suspension, and memory-ties → queering exhaustive forms of start and end. Soft, harmonized voices feel cyclical, sweet, and honest. Cloaked and wrapped in blankets, the performers tip toe through the audience. The space is lit by one candle poled within a slice of cake. The sweetness of a re-written song casts comedic bursts as the visual of softness becomes disrupted by silly lyrics that you wouldn’t normally associate with the sound. A sense of sistership is brought into being here in the sweet silliness and intimacy of the candlelight and the artists’ creative addition of cups to their microphones. Alluding to makeshift telephone strings or walkie-talkie vibes, this visual easily embodies ideas of secrecy bound to shared histories and unspoken loyalties of sistership. This visual gently taps into nostalgic imagery while simultaneously relaying back to present relationships over distance → this allows the performance to be so fun while grounding the space with earnest movements and sincerity.

We returned to memories of growing up. Specific young relationships, firsts, sisterhood, toys, colours, states, vague imagery, senses of belonging and isolation ….  and even with growing up in very different places and times, the overlap would come suddenly and often, we’d bubble up with laughter or grief, and the nostalgia carved an easy path to follow. 

Whole heap of little horses 

Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep you little baby
When you wake, get some cake and ride them pretty little horses

Sugar and spice, all things nice
Whole heap of little horses
Sugar and spice, fool me twice
Whole heap of little horse

Pink and green, jelly been dream
Whole heap of little horse
Diamonds and pearls, be a good girl 
Whole heap of little horses 

Up and away, sorrows on the way 
Whole heap of little horses 
Up and away sorrow on the way
Whole heap of little horses

Lilly white glove, I’ll be loved
Whole heap of little horses 
Little white glove, I’ll be loved
Whole heap of stinking horse shit 

This work made me reflect on how my own practice stems from the kinesthetic inbetweenness and erosion-based practices of athletic dance training (across the timeline of teenhood to adulthood). The term kinesthetic inbetweenness refers to the lived experiences and somatics of being suspended between trans-culture, language, identity, and physical states → recorded and processed through the movement of the body. 8 Counts into the Void acknowledges these complex, painful, laborious cycles of artistic understanding within the competitive landscape of past training rituals. During the performance, the audience is immersed by the intensity of repeated jazz combinations, alluding to teen competitive training models. The practice approaches performance with tender memory-based materials like harmonized sound, cake & candles, bubbles, and bubblegum.

My relationship to beauty has always been fraught with conflict. Since girl hood I slipped between esthetics of tomboyishness and frilly ballerina tutus. 

The identity ‘girl’ has made me feel love, judgment, community, exclusion, expansion, and limit.

The word pretty has irritated my inner thoughts like a grain of sand in an oyster. Mulling it over. Turning it around. Trying to make it into something beautiful.

I used to wish I could control how I was perceived. The labour of this task made me so weary.

My fatigue was a masterclass in letting go.

I’m tired.
I’m letting go.
I want you to see me as you like.

One of the recurring notions was that in dance, In life, In femme youth, being taught to chase perfection, to perform correctly, smile at the right time, be cute, the drive to make everything seem effortless is pervasive. And specifically in the world of competitive dance, ( or my experience of it in the 80s/90s) the vigorous training to prioritize how you are received over your felt experience. Who was I in the process of taking this on?

How many of us tone down and grey out the frilly femme pink bubbly silliness that wants to emerge in response to this? Reclamation is/ was.. Necessary? Putting sparkles on my face and sincerely doing silly jazz moves in bloomers was more profound than I anticipated. 

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Accumulating repetitions, both performers challenge distinct bodily decision-making where their facial expressions begin to become disjointed from the on-time, rigorous movement structures the body is attempting to drive across the floor; across time. There’s huge amounts of pressure we’re under, both as individuals and collectively, within athletic and dance training environments. 8 Counts into the Void allowed me to reflect on how somatic strategies can acknowledge the capacity and imagination to not only sit with traumatic memory and these pressures, but to move with and reclaim it.

 I'm interested in all the ways that emotional unravelling and exhaustion can happen while trying to be “pretty” and in the dreamlike state where exhaustion becomes comforting and potentially connective. The strange catharsis of giving everything you have, where your body keeps moving even as your mind drifts and questions. The blank stares, the stillness in it. Quiet existential dread is no doubt one of the emotional centres of the work.

“I’m pretty.. Tired.”

Visually separating how the mind and body perform, Keeling and Gawthrop engage with exhaustion by revealing the physical and psychological consequences of sustained discipline. What does it mean to watch a body collapse as an audience member? 8 Counts into the Void questions the position of the audience as witness, confronting us with an exhaustion that is both raw and recognizable. We are asked to consider the ways strength is produced, performed, and demanded of the body → from athletic training and the conditioning of femininity to broader historical hierarchies. By making exhaustion visible and then imbuing it with a statement of beauty, the performers reclaim and disrupt the expectations being placed upon them.

 We played with not necessarily performing, but sharing, re-visiting, demonstrating the emotional conflict that exists underneath that pressure, the breakdown, the ways it showed up differently for each of us in real time. I'm so glad to have had such an intimate space. Nobody was trying to fool anybody, there was a wink, nudge to the audience, “we know that you know that we know that you know what's going on here”. Having that kind of intimacy with an audience while doing the intense choreo we chose was very satisfying.

  That said, It was important to me (us) that we didn't poke fun of the dance world, we wanted to stay completely sincere to the innocent love we had for it. Who doesn't genuinely love dancing choreography in unison? There is something simply satisfying and powerful about precision and resonance. And in the same breath, there is something absurd and violent about striving hard for that perfection, and we wanted to acknowledge it without turning it into parody or vilifying the effort.

What are we critiquing/witnessing when the body continues to exert the mind, revealing its capacity through the slop and slosh of an exhausted face? We hear the overlapping sync of the artists’ voices. It sounds like surrender, but also feels like a shared form of trust where the performers’ storytelling allows the audience to become aware of how far they’re pushing their bodies. Keeling and Gawthrop’s bodies sink as if the air thickens, and as a magical surprise, bubbles start to float down to them. 

I love how scent is also being integrated into more performances! The smell of bubblegum fills the space from the first “pop!” This scent immediately takes the audience into the interior of the body through yet another passage. It’s exciting to push the sensorial capacity of a small venue space to contain smell → meanwhile the performers continue to transcend the space from a bubblegum “cheek kiss,” connecting the gum to stretch across and stick to the walls of the space. 

The performers draw a line in bubblegum, watching the gum sink, stretched beyond capacity. There’s a grace to the physicality of giving into the floor. There’s something habitual presented within Gawthrop and Keeling’s floorwork partnering where it feels like a shared brain cell. Habitual in dedicated practice → but also how these contact points with the floor and their bodies reveals the potential for the body to physically move beyond the mind. This takes me back to their notion of girlipop existentialism of “What is the point?” → Who is our research for? 

The sparkly, funny interplay of surfing adrenaline while missing the bodily cues of burnout, with the internal expectation to continue performing built from the external/societal regulated pressures. 

This notion of moving across comes up frequently throughout the work, appearing both in the writing and through recurring performance memories: moving across the floor, stretching across space, moving across time, or crossing one’s legs. Across becomes a way of thinking about how gestures carry and transmit histories. The crossed leg, for example, can evoke learned notions of femininity and bodily comportment, while the crossing of legs between bodies shifts this familiar gesture into something relational. Through contact, weight, and attunement, the gesture becomes a site of queer knowledge → one that is learned not through instruction, but through sensing and responding to another body.

We nodded and smiled at our early queerness. I thought often about how some of the tenderness between us might be read and interpreted. I hold my cards close to the chest at the best of times, so sharing this part of my story was an edge I wanted to take a running leap off. I didn't actually realize I was craving permission to share this part of my youth. The sincerity to my experience mattered more to me than how it may put me in a box. ( wink) And fortunately, we trust the community that would receive us.  

Keeling and Gawthrop interweave their voices in the work with so much thoughtful power felt through the intimacy of their friendship. This made me reflect about the modality of searching when finding and losing your voice. Vocal practice was such a huge part of my life when going to an arts high school. While balancing competitive dance training, I participated in choral practice three days a week + vocal studies classes and it really allowed me to lean into prettiness, exhaustion, and understanding/growing into self → through this practice, and doing it with others. When my choral teacher passed four years ago, the feeling of losing and the existentialism that comes with educational memory, 8 Counts into the Void held space for that sense of relation and kinship with others, but also the self. 

The performers tenderly hold each other’s heads, continually switching back and forth between giving and receiving weight. Their bodies move through a tension between collapse and control, maneuvering and supporting one another while negotiating the limits of their own capacity. Against this physical labour, they sing “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” introducing a familiar language of femininity, pleasure, and play. Yet the phrase becomes increasingly unsettled as their bodies continue to work, carry, and exhaust themselves. 8 Counts into the Void ends by leaving a gap around the question: what do girls just wanna? What does it mean to want pleasure while carrying the accumulated expectations, histories, and labour placed upon the feminine body? This contradiction here is that “girls just wanna have fun” becomes almost unbearable against the amount of work their bodies are doing. The song promises ease, while the performers demonstrate labour. 

In my art and life, I have been following a thread that began with my reading of Audre Lorde’s essay The Uses of the Erotic. In the essay, Lorde considers the distinction between the erotic and the pornographic: the erotic as a generative, deeply felt source of power, and the pornographic as sensation without that deeper connection to fulfillment.

Following these ideas, I have been investigating the interplay between being performative and being demonstrative. For me, the distinction lies in my relationship to sincerity. To be performative is, in some ways, to understand the act of being seen as commodity. To be demonstrative is to consent to an open display of feeling and sensation. It is to generously share a state with another person rather than simply present an image of that state.

My hope is that by wiping my tears and sweat on my frilly pink sleeve, my heart will be seen and you will feel less alone in the vastness of it all.

“TRY to relax”, impossible.

There's beauty in trying, and a weight of perfectionism, and a freedom that can exist inside exhaustion. I wanted permission to visit those places and be seen there. The permission became the whole point. The permission to wear this frilly dress, the bows, the sparkle fishnets. And to wear them in a spectrum of grief, fighting, surrendering, playing, supporting, and collapse. 

I wanted to revisit memories with compassion, recognizing the ways my identitie(s) formed in the container of performance, and welcoming the quieter tender moments into the fold.

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let’s start by getting in our bodies
join in if you'd like, to notice your body
breathe in,
let your chin drop to your chest
tilt your head to the right
feel your feet on the ground
tilt your head to the left
feel the weight of your arms, heavy by your side
move your hands up and above your head
notice the skylights
reach to one side
the other
melt down 
let’s try again
move your hands up and above your head
can you smell the chlorine?
reach to the side
the other
melt down
stay here for a little longer
stay here

Out of the water, pool notes and (mis)alignments arrives with creators and performers, Aysia Tse and H(annah) Kryworuchko, physically moving through slow, invitational stretch undulations guided by their recorded voices. The space shifts. Time collapses. They are joined by live sound in collaboration with artist duo Chrystal Sting, creating spherical live sound patterns and geometries in response to the performers’ movement in water. Repetition becomes a form of return, as the duration of these movements echoes and brings the audience into collective embodiment. 

They return back with their chests guiding audiences to the highest point of the ceiling of Hart House, an institutional swimming pool based in so-called toronto.

The ways Kryworuchko and Tse hold a collaborative relationship is multi-layered. Their long-time training in synchro-swimming is one of many connections they share, and anchors the process of the work:

We work together as co-coaches, teammates, and have had a lot of conversations of our own personal histories with pools and competitive sport. These are spaces that can be fun and awesome, but also complicated, challenging, and confusing.

In the world of competitive artistic swimming, your performance is judged based on how you look. This puts the focus on the external and can often disconnect ourselves from our bodies and the experience of movement. 

Drawing from this movement world of artistic swimming, we intentionally disrupt its normative systems and aesthetic expectations of precision, uniformity, alignment. The work is about exchanging these experiences and challenging the wider dynamics of being in unison, in pattern, in perfect alignment with others. We consider, through this performance, how we position and relate to each other and ourselves, and how we build more flexible practices and relationships in rigid systems.

can you smell the chlorine?

As the audience notices the space alongside Kryworuchko and Tse, this question brings up the exclusion chlorine creates for many disabled bodies → Kryworuchko and Tse call into question “barrier-free” accessibility in this pool space. 

stay here

The grounding script was an intentional choice for a soft beginning. It was important for us as performers to think through how we could ease into the performance together, listening to our bodies and notice our surroundings first. We chose to invite the audience to do the same, to receive the sensory information of Hart House and slowly, the experience of the work. And, when we are encountering a pool space in this way, we also intervene in the systems that perpetuate exclusion and regulate us.

To prepare for this performance, we choreographed in a backyard pool of a family friend, rehearsed in permitted UofT pool time alongside young athletes we coach, and at public (and free) city of Toronto outdoor pools. It was interesting to practice in these types of pool spaces that each have different dynamics and levels of access and regulation. It made us reflect on the visibility and exposure of our trans/queer/crip/mad bodyminds in public and private spaces, engaging in newer approaches to water-based choreography.

With the vastness of the space, you can’t help but notice everyone around you. To live in the rareness of this performance → how often are multiple people gathered here, sitting curiously on the edges of a pool deck? I notice a young girl doing the stretch with Tse and Kryworuchko for the whole duration at the opposite end of the pool. While sitting, she accidentally dips her hair in the water.

The space is shaped by the history of the tiles, the vast ceilings, the wash of large white tarps breathing like sails, the peeling white tape on the white construction walls. Within the blankness, their bodies dive! The form of the body is fragmenting in reflection. In water, the performing bodies are destabilized and decentralized, shifting our attention away from athleticism and toward the embodied experience of being.

This sense of arrival and activeness becomes entangled with the history of the space, where the act of occupying the pool unsettles its past as a gender-restrictive site. Audience toes (and hair dips) trail the outer edges of the pool while watching Tse and Kryworuchko. Audience bodies create ripples that either disappear and fade or meet with the performers’. Depending on the transfer of energy in the water, this sense of meeting one another in the middle is a really intelligent way of interrogating and reimagining spaces like this → how public pool spaces, especially Hart House, live in both regulation of breath and pool administration, recent and exclusive gendered histories, and regimented, competition-based, outcome-driven infrastructures. With this image of the ripples, pool notes and (mis)alignments leans into intricate strategies that allow forms of existence to queer and crip these spaces.  

Accessibility is a value deeply embedded in our collaborations. We are committed to expanding access in our process, and what that would mean for presentation as well. For this project, our creation process took the shape of a 3-day residency style creation where we had the time to be slow, listen to our capacities, eat together, laugh together, and read. Two texts, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Rebellious Bodies and Radical Acts: Deaf and Disabled Artists Raise the Curtain on Cripping the Stage by Alex Bulmer and Debbie Patterson (2026), greatly informed this project as we dream of what inclusive and inviting aquatic spaces could be and feel like.

Presenting work built from this disabled/queer intimacy where we value access, looked like clear and soft scheduling that could be shifted if needed, practicing different structures of pool deck etiquette, and creating a performance access guide. When we collaborate we aim to facilitate casual creative exchange, and for us this means organized programming that is deeply thought through and responds to the uncomfortable realities of often exclusive spaces - whether that’s an academic, aquatic or other institutional space. And, we still can do more. Access is not a check box, it is ongoing, informed, and flexible, and we continue to work through and with these things together.

When bodies unfold through relational synchronizations rather than relying primarily on entrained movements, performance is utilized to challenge production-driven training modes. In constant re-negotiation by Tse and Kryworucho’s own embodied topographies, kinesthetic inbetweenness quietly vibrates through the water of the pool and the water of audience bodies. Reimagining rest and awareness, their lived experiences suspend in the somatic reflection of the water → between the in-flux weight of public and private training spaces. This sense of relational sync is palpable. It is felt as though it were an interior place of the body. Like sonar communication, this awareness ripples between audience and water → audience and performers → performer and performer → performers and water → water to space. 

Connected by ankles, the performers float along the water’s surface, moving in a state of active tethering side to side → switching between angular surface geometries, between their body/ies and the water surface. In the water, the choreography of pool notes and (mis)alignments feels like a living map in constant shift and re/form. 

While we watch their bodies carry and move below and above the waterline, I wonder about the terms of swim vs move. When I think of swimming, I think of the various forms of dislocation, propelling the body to move through water. In movement, the terms feel broader with the shift and maneuver of the body in constant reorientation. Kryworuchko and Tse rebalance this understanding of water-based movement with their deep history and knowledge of artistic swimming, where they re-evaluate the motions of treading water with showing the body floating and dangling in positions of rest. 

This gesture of dangling the arms; I think of fluidity in a bodymind, but also the acknowledgement of rest and exhaustion. 

Breaks are also interwoven throughout, and because of the vastness of the space, I appreciated the moments where visibility of the body becomes fragmented, where at times audience members’ view of the performers is invisible. 

We still hear the wash of pool splashes, intermixed with sound collaboration from Crystal Sting. I want to emphasize how impactful a live sound collaboration is within this work as a live mapping. Live sound carries this idea of dislocating the body, and with every in the moment sound shift, this collaboration allows the body to simply be kinesthetically in between bodies of sound and water. 

With Crystal Sting, we worked to have the sound be resonant of our values around shifting capacities and pacing through the repetition, soft pulse, syncopated vibraphone with changing rhythmic divisions and energy. Their sonic approaches to the space felt special for us, who often only swim with competition-specific routine music, and felt aligned with our intentions to interrupt the expectations of uniformity and precision.

Recalling audiences’ repeated responses to how beautiful this work is (which it is) the performance reimagines traditional notions of artistic swimming by locating beauty not only in its moments of synchronized form, but within the process of moving, adapting, and negotiating in the water. The pool becomes a space where the body can be more flexible, more responsive, and more accepting of its own complicatedness. Unique to dance praxis, the body creates room for beauty to emerge in the water through the body’s capacity to listen as a form of practicing and processing. Tse and Kryworuchko’s choreography carries the body over: hands tread, bodies miss and re-align with breath, multiple configurations of arms and legs capture the understanding of perceiving a body/bodies. Flexed feet, deep-water bodies, splashes, and moments of suspension disrupt the precision we might associate with ‘the swimmer.’ The movement continually shifts between control and surrender, between the trained body and the body simply breathing to float.

This becomes most apparent in the final image. Tse emerges from the pool and removes her goggles while Kryworuchko continues their final movements in the water, still wearing theirs. They meet and counter each other’s weight to come out of the water. For a moment, the ‘body in water’ and the ‘body out of water’ become visible in contrast: one equipped for the water, the other exposed to it. Neither exists independently. Their bodies rely on one another to surface. In this meeting place, pool notes and (mis)alignments leaves us not with the perfection of the swimmer, but with the inclusivity, adaptability and relationality of the body → and perhaps this is where its sense of beauty as relation ultimately lives in the work.

At the beginning of the performance with the grounding script, we considered how we arrive in spaces together. The exit choreography was also important to us. In this part of the performance, we explored the idea of supported departures. We discussed many possibilities of ways to leave the water and the pool deck. Alone or together, in what manner, with what timing, and why. Exit strategies can be important plans for many mad/disabled people, and a part of this is knowing how and when we need to leave, where to go when you do. One way we have been able to support each other is to share these plans with one another and include specific things we may need (or not) in those moments.

Our exit in pool notes and (mis)alignments includes a moment of shared struggle, suspended between holding another or pulling another into deep water, pulling from the duality between needing or wanting to go, or not, and how we can help the other in the process. 

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INSERT RECORDING SNIPPET? QR LINK?

un-tidaled was formed as part of 2026 Summer Love-In’s digital session, where participants from wherever could participate in a collective reading performance experiment. Think durational performance meets speech act theory, meets “reading group.” From a mix of readings and authors that have guided my own practice, this experiment integrates academic theory, review-based logic, and poetry from various scholars interested in movement. Participants include [insert names]. 

Participants were invited to bring one page critical/poetic readings discussing movement in any way or form. Moving through a shared, slow digital scroll, participants improvise the practice of collective reading together, while sporadically other participants may turn their cameras off to engage in a response-based durational movement exploration, then turn their cameras back on to participate in the reading and listening. 

Redefining performance and roles of audienceship, this experiment offered the space to simply exist at your own pace while exchanging knowledge. Oral movement becomes a framework for questioning how bodies are shaped by social expectations, revealing invisible labour practices//rhythms//ripples embedded in performance. Practicing the disjunctive autonomy of the body within the digital space, we created a time to play within the attunements and questions of “who is our research for?” This leans back into’ notions of audienceship and redefining expectations of the performing body present in both 8 Counts into the Void and pool notes & (mis)alignments. 

Digital interruptions happen by accident quite frequently in online meetings. un-tidaled invites the organic nature and understanding of participating in this work, by considering interruptions as part of the performance → as part of being. This shifts how performers release any emotional ownership to being heard or understood. These glitches formed a collective voice held by individual choices. How can we sit with glitches in the light of a digital improvised performance where the goal of the score is to simply listen?

Shifting the improv into a score, this was my first time providing direction and participating briefly. There was feedback in the desire to move ahead inter-collectively, while the experiment held room to leave and return. This made me question the autonomy and role of the “host”. This idea of host is inherently entangled with virtual meeting language that then brings the experiment to be contained within the software, and the idea of leading the scroll, holding the meeting place of where participants can make vocal choices based from what they see, and movement choice based on what they hear and the privacy of off-camera movement.

Investigating how bodies carry memory, expectation, fatigue, desire, and resilience →  I’m still reflecting on how these experiences shape both performance and everyday life post performance. Cultural lineage and history were interwoven throughout each piece of writing, creating another layer of memory and context within the work.

There was a heavy preciousness attached to certain authors and their words. As mostly strangers coming together through a Zoom meeting to read fragments of writing, making creative fragmented decisions, participants’ presence and respect held within the “room” emphasized the value of each piece. Fragments that might have felt small or incomplete on the page became significant through the collective act of witnessing. The pauses, hesitations, vocal textures, keyboard sounds to mute and unmute, and silences between words created another kind of embodied archive. In this way, the Zoom room became more than a site of exchange → holding a temporary space where writing could be carried by another body and returned, eroded, returned, eroded...

I think that’s where this idea of virtual meeting etiquette/practice comes into question. How do we gather virtually? And is it actually more or less accessible when we collectively mute and unmute?

un-tidaled is the space to understand being without tethering to this form of etiquette, leaning into the discomfort… This is something I’m still tending to with developing this work exchange/collective reading performance experiment. Tending to score vs map? Audience vs Us as All in space? 

INSERT THE RECORDING SCRIPT

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This isn’t easy work. When we’re talking about capacity and presence, this collective endurance between the artist duos and groups amplifies the intricacies that create meaningful visuals of kinship and cooperation. 8 Counts into the Void, pool notes and (mis)alignments, and un-tidaled lean into the complexities of being a body with all of its layered hi/stories, while skillfully redefining performance and performance spaces. The works do this by collapsing the general motions of “returning to memory.” By highlighting the plurality of memory as a continuous negotiation through movement, site, and embodied experience, each performance work shifts how we, as an audience, understand one another through the complex topography of our bodies. Through the “translation” of performance, the works are able to pose these questions indirectly, allowing us to witness the work in this common place of inbetweenness. What makes art-making so crucial is through these embodied exchanges, they’re revealing the fractal systems that allow us to bridge this idea of non-linear time as the interior mappings of the body → revitalizing the joy, introspection, and curiosity of witnessing and experiencing performance.