Taking its departure from choreographer Elisabeth Motley’s lived experience of neurodivergence, Colored Shadow considers embodiments of seizure, psychosis and cognitive, and physical disability as original creativities. This 2nd episode in Motley’s long-form practice-as-research offers a crip performance practice that resists categorizations of the body and proposes a broad and multiple disability representation. Solo dance scores emerging from medical archives are practiced in spontaneous co-creation with live projected film scores composed by Brent Felker. The projection design as a site of light and capture generates non-linear maps that decenter notions of compulsory time and space. Colored Shadow is dislocated from the theater in order to unsettle the territory of a stage/body. A rhizomatic sculpture created by artist Jillian Rose is utilized as a cartographic and modular performance space. The sculpture is deconstructed and reconstituted as a crip landscape with which dance + projectipn assembles mutually. Integrally contributing to this research is long-time collaborator Cory Nakasue who offers a non-traditional dramaturgy of astrology, poetics, and somatization.
As a proposal for radical neurodivergent knowing, Colored Shadow uses rhizomatic procedures – in particular map-making – as a framework to (dis)organize. After ginger, asparagus, Lily of the Valley, and ant nests, rhizomes possess original cartographic capability. They do not follow traces of other structures and instead randomly chart a unique orientation through the earth. Similarly, Colored Shadow practices map-making to overwrite. It authors a new topography out of the archival charts, graphs, MRIs, and clinical notes connected to the choreographer’s hospitalizations and medicalization for a recurring brain disease. Colored Shadow as a performance practice produces the body as an active site of cultural contestation while prising open possibilities for all rhythms of neurological expressivity.
“All the time shadows had to borrow the colors of the objects on which they would fall” (Mukhopadhyay, 2008: 21).
Where + When
Cornell Creative Arts Center Parking Lot (Entrance at 88 Bruyn Ave. Kingston, NY 12401)
https://goo.gl/maps/W2KTFt9etzi9WP42A
Friday, June 11th and Saturday, June 12th at 8:30 pm.
Rain date: Friday, June 18th at 8:30 pm
This event will be outdoors, attentive to Covid-19 protocols, and social distancing.
Access
There will be no traditional seating at this event (approximately 35 minutes in duration). Limited seating will be made available. This location is wheelchair accessible. An audio description of the performance will be made available. If you have particular access requirements, do get in touch with ASK at 845-338-0333 or ask@askforarts.org to discuss these.
As a guest of the Kingston Community
This project and previous episodes of this project have intensely collaborated with dramaturg and Munsee Lenape (also known as Kingston, NY) resident Cory Nakasue since 2018. Colored Shadow visits and takes place in Kingston in order to broaden its interdependence with Nakasue and expand a growing web of disability culture inclusion. The project intentionally stems toward community exchange, collaborating with Kingston artists Brent Felker (Film), Sasa (Costume), and Jillian Rose (Sculpture), as well as the Arts Society of Kingston, and Cornell Creative Arts Center. Colored Shadow as an ephemera visits as a mode of interrogating power systems and rootedness – it does not stay. Recognizing the inherent problematization of visitation, this research has consciously endeavored to exchange. In keeping, this project and its collaborators honor the stolen land of the Munsee Lenape.
Land Acknowledgement: The Cornell Creative Arts Center recognizes, acknowledges and respects the Munsee Lenape Peoples as traditional stewards of the land our building is located on. We pay respect to Munsee Lenape peoples past, present, and future and their continuing presence in the homeland and throughout the indigenous diaspora.
