“infinity is duality
the outside
and the inside
of everything
and nothing”

-Sun Ra, “the alternative to limitation”

Imagine a three-circled venn diagram. In each circle are the words Animals, Dance, and Science Fiction. Between Animals and Dance we have the words Hard to See. Between Dance and Science Fiction: World Building. Between Science Fiction and Animals is Transformation. And then in the center is what this project is chasing: an articulation of the inarticulable, of opacity, of unintelligibility. “The World-Building of Dance-Making” uses the notion of dance notation as a grounding point to attempt a visualization of thought. A question I consider regularly, how does one think without words?, is both the start and the finish of each of these works, a series of mixed media assemblages that spiral out and back in on themselves to encompass an entire cosmology of references in two-dimensional fixed-point works.  

This project imagines complete dances placed in a flower press and removed after centuries, and attempts a translation of the sensation of dancing into the still and two-dimensional. Brightly coloured and using flattened perspectives, each work has a specific cast of dancers - artists from the historical western dance canon, animals kind enough to join, and local inspirations - engaging with a choreographic score accompanying them on the page. Fanny Cerrito and Vaslav Nijinsky improvise alongside several nudibranch in a work about somatic breathwork; Missy Elliott and Tamara Karsavina turn into slugs onstage; humpback whales wear 120 year old costumes to perform a circle dance; a massive wall of dance invites you to step inside. A series of intuitive gestures describe the quality and affect of the work, energy of the audience, and sensations of the dancers. These works attempt the impossible in capturing an entire performance in a single visible moment. Peggy Phelan wrote that “Live performance…disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation and control.” (Phelan, 1993). These works do not seek to evade this disappearance, but rather attempt a restoration from memory, an archeological dig at creating a work of dance backwards. They attempt a poetics of understanding and a flattened stage on which I, and others, can dance.

This body of work was created as a thesis exhibition for a Masters in Visual Studies at the University of Toronto, 2024.

All photos by Tony Hafkensheid, 2024