Experimental Movement Analysis

I recently performed and co-choreographed a dance that utilized technology (projections, computer programming, sound) and the body. Stepping outside of the piece and watching it on film, I’d like to interrogate the way race, the body, and the visual interact with technology. During the performance, the director of the work (a white male) stood behind a table playing music and projecting images that directly responded to the dancers' (all women of color) bodies. Like shadows, the projections mimicked the dancer’s movements and followed them through space. In one section, these projections formed body-like masses on the screen behind the dancers. These amorphous clusters of lines would move in tandem with (or a few seconds later than) the dancers, but sometimes they would move after the dancers had stopped moving—flicking and jittering in place or reaching out to connect with the other dancers' shadows/shapes on the screen.

The dancers wore all white—the only color that worked with the technology (so that the dancers could be seen in the dark room and so that colored light could be reflected on their bodies).

How does technology function here? As a way in which the dancers can move beyond race by obscuring themselves in the darkness, a way of attaining Gilroy’s post-racial humanism? If so, the piece would seem to problematize the reliance on the visual to provide objective truths about race. Furthermore, it would seem to challenge the reliance on representation as well: the dancer’s shadows are at once representatives (standing in the place) of something lost/past and representations (reflecting reality)— yet neither form of representation accurately depicts the dancers. Or, if racial invisibility is not the desired goal, does this racial obfuscation erase the importance of the visual in understanding racial identity, effectively making women of color invisible?

The dancers’ past and future selves are in constant motion, moving beyond the stasis of the ongoing present. One could argue, that this piece represents moving beyond the problem of historical racial memory and trauma, and reaches toward a space of mobility and self-creation. Maybe this is Keeling’s explosion, in that in moving toward affect, race persists in the sensory motor system, and that the past, or the shadow, is crucial here in its interaction with the future. Perhaps this is the explosion—the bringing together of the past (the shadow), the present (the dancer), and the future (the after-image, lingering shadow, technology).

Perhaps these dancers are performing the future of race—a dream sequence in which differences are whited-out and light dances on their bodies like a reflection of the human nervous system. It is almost as if the dancers were translucent. There is fluidity, movement, and a Dobson-esque symbiosis between humans and machines in this dream of the future.