Figuring out a dance

solo work is not my strong suit

I began “Blood Memory” as a collaboration with two other performers who have personal stories of separation from their homeland. We spent a week together during a residency in early 2022 moving through several small nuggets of ideas that would lead me down the path of creating what this piece has come to be.

My collaborator Estefania wrote a beautiful reflection on that week that includes the following:

It’s a process that moved in undulating waves. Like standing on the shore of an island constantly changing as the tides came in and out, taking and then depositing sand onto a landscape in perpetual flux.

We spoke and moved, wrote, and tried to tell stories with our bodies, with words, telepathically, communicating well, other times realizing that a vivid internal dialogue had in fact been a monologue.

When we first began we started with the selves. Our own experience of what it means to belong, to cultivate community, to experience loss, feel transplanted, uprooted, to feel the gravitational pull of a loss. A pound of flesh removed from your chest that you were never explicitly made aware of..…and yet the loss is felt. What it means to know yourself and how it’s more a journey rather than a destination. Like a radioactive element, moments can break off protons and suddenly uranium is lead.

As we discussed the intricacies of our own upbringings, our traumas and moments of growth and joy, our conversations began to reach out from that center of the self and tendrils touched on other ways memory/connection/loss/ancestry/identity/spiritualism/blood and so much more has played out for us. Some points focused on what we could explain. The science of blood connection, we spoke of genetics and DNA and the bonds that we carry within our very marrow. The tangible, albeit intangible (unless you happen to carry an electron microscope in your back pocket) parts of our connections. Our faces on other bodies, punnett squares, shared mannerisms divided by an ocean, our vices played out between different lips, the diseases passed down on our personal recipes, like a tale told round a camp fire.

But we also touched on the invisible.

As I dug further and further into what is at the center of this work—while it does include a connection to so many stories of separation from family, from land, from culture—is myself.

As a choreographer, I love making work for and with groups. I love the ability to carve space, to create formations, to be able to step back and have a third-person perspective as I’m creating. But I feel I can’t do that here. This piece has become too personal for anyone else to dance it right now. So I’ve been embarking in the difficult task of making dance for myself.

During my residency at AANM, I have created several sections of choreography. Right now they are modules. I am not 100% certain of what order they will appear in the piece, but I am getting closer to figuring that out. One larger idea that will continue to be developed after I leave is that I am working with a musical collaborator to create a score based on parts of my DNA sequence.

A seemingly obvious discovery we found early in the process is that most humans have a very similar DNA sequence because it simply codes us as human. But we do have unique parts that tie us to parts of our ancestry, and for me, we’re looking specifically at my maternal haplogroup. (I also have two X chromosomes, so we can’t see my paternal line in my DNA.)

Jesse suggested we introduce a camera to track my movements and correspond with some different sections of my DNA, to make the music a bit more dynamic. The early sketch of this we have right now is just using midi instruments, so it sounds a bit like a video game. But these will be re-recorded with some more traditional Arab instrumentation. In the video below, you can perhaps imagine the cursor is my body moving around the space.

When I return to Brooklyn, we will mount a camera on the ceiling, and it will trigger the music for this section of the piece.

While some of the choreography modules I created will be used in conjunction with this DNA music, I also have been working on creating some improvisational scores. I have a lot of themes and motifs I’ve been playing with, but there is not set choreography that remains the exact same each time. For this, I created a set of rules to guide my movement research (the page on the right) and a score that helps guide the movements. This score will likely be danced with this DNA music as well.

Side note for my creative readers: I started this residency with a brand new notebook and set it up in this method, and it’s been such a good way of keeping my thoughts organized.

Stay tuned for a few more entries here as I enter my final full week in residence at the museum. I’ll be talking a bit about some of the projections/visuals I’m creating for this performance as well as a side quest into DJing and dance music and how it made its way into this piece.