In This Together: a performance installation
In This Together was a durational performance installation choreographed by Michael J. Morris with the performers Náamah Leerdam, Maddie McKenney-Lydick, Wynn Patrick, and Lunamar Muñoz Rodríguez. It was performed from 5-8pm November 8-10, 2018, in the MIX Gallery in Mulberry House on the campus of Denison University.
This performance was simultaneously produced through one-on-one interactions with audience participants while also functioning as a visual and auditory spectacle for visitors witnessing the piece. The spectacle as a whole participated in a range of traditions, including minimalist and pedestrian postmodern dance, performance art, service aesthetics, healing aesthetics, and art as ritual.
Building connection was the central guiding principle of the project, a principle which manifested in a variety of ways. The piece invited audience members to consider the juxtaposition of illustrations by Pamela Colman Smith’s Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot; excerpts from texts by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Joy Harjo, bell hooks, Andrea Jenkins, and Audre Lorde; sound by Deborah van Dyke; and interactions with the performers. In this context, meaning was not prescriptive; rather, meaningfulness emerged through the ways in which connections were made between layers of visual, aural, textual, physical, and interpersonal content. This practice of meaning-making was not driven by linear rationality, but instead invited audience members and participants to engage in processes of finding or experiencing connections between potentially disparate sensations, perceptions, and information. This was an exercise in complexity, in making sense of the ways that experience holds together seemingly unrelated phenomena, and creating or discovering nonlinear, intuitive structures of significance.
This project also emerged from the conviction that connection is a source of personal and collective healing, a medicine for pervasive experiences of disconnection, alienation, isolation, antagonism, and animosity that organize our lives in contemporary society. Connection then is both a practice of making meaning and generating healing, inviting us to consider as well the ways in which we might heal ourselves through developing strategies for making our lives more meaningful. We offer this durational performance installation as a resource for cultivating such strategies. Connection drives the piece: making connections between distinct compositional elements, between performers and audience members, and between people who occupy different lived experiences and social identities. I am quite interested in how "making connections" is simultaneously integral to processes of generating meaning, to building community, to personal healing, and to collective liberation.
When making In This Together, I was compelled to take seriously the complex, divisive, and antagonistic social climate in which we're living, and the ways in which art can provide opportunities for experimenting with new or different forms of social relation. The piece is also concerned with meaning-making processes, the ways in which we co-create meaningful experiences from potentially disparate or seemingly unrelated information. This seems like a task with which we are all faced, all day, every day: making sense of all the different kinds of information coming our way in different media. Drawing from my work with intimate, durational performance art (such as 40 Kisses (31 Kisses): Meeting Place/Stop Killing Us and cuddle) and pushing at limits of what we can consider to be a dance, I wanted to create a structure in which meaningful exchanges between performers and audience members could emerge.
This performance was simultaneously produced through one-on-one interactions with audience participants while also functioning as a visual and auditory spectacle for visitors witnessing the piece. The spectacle as a whole participated in a range of traditions, including minimalist and pedestrian postmodern dance, performance art, service aesthetics, healing aesthetics, and art as ritual.
Building connection was the central guiding principle of the project, a principle which manifested in a variety of ways. The piece invited audience members to consider the juxtaposition of illustrations by Pamela Colman Smith’s Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot; excerpts from texts by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Joy Harjo, bell hooks, Andrea Jenkins, and Audre Lorde; sound by Deborah van Dyke; and interactions with the performers. In this context, meaning was not prescriptive; rather, meaningfulness emerged through the ways in which connections were made between layers of visual, aural, textual, physical, and interpersonal content. This practice of meaning-making was not driven by linear rationality, but instead invited audience members and participants to engage in processes of finding or experiencing connections between potentially disparate sensations, perceptions, and information. This was an exercise in complexity, in making sense of the ways that experience holds together seemingly unrelated phenomena, and creating or discovering nonlinear, intuitive structures of significance.
This project also emerged from the conviction that connection is a source of personal and collective healing, a medicine for pervasive experiences of disconnection, alienation, isolation, antagonism, and animosity that organize our lives in contemporary society. Connection then is both a practice of making meaning and generating healing, inviting us to consider as well the ways in which we might heal ourselves through developing strategies for making our lives more meaningful. We offer this durational performance installation as a resource for cultivating such strategies. Connection drives the piece: making connections between distinct compositional elements, between performers and audience members, and between people who occupy different lived experiences and social identities. I am quite interested in how "making connections" is simultaneously integral to processes of generating meaning, to building community, to personal healing, and to collective liberation.
When making In This Together, I was compelled to take seriously the complex, divisive, and antagonistic social climate in which we're living, and the ways in which art can provide opportunities for experimenting with new or different forms of social relation. The piece is also concerned with meaning-making processes, the ways in which we co-create meaningful experiences from potentially disparate or seemingly unrelated information. This seems like a task with which we are all faced, all day, every day: making sense of all the different kinds of information coming our way in different media. Drawing from my work with intimate, durational performance art (such as 40 Kisses (31 Kisses): Meeting Place/Stop Killing Us and cuddle) and pushing at limits of what we can consider to be a dance, I wanted to create a structure in which meaningful exchanges between performers and audience members could emerge.
In This Together from Michael J. Morris on Vimeo.