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I think my practice— I have had the opportunity to work with many different types of collections. My earlier work—continuous work deals with the history of colonial objects, African masks specifically. And so I've also had the opportunity to create a lot of performance in museum spaces.
And part of that is conceptual. But a lot of it is about thinking through this idea of, how do we challenge the spaces and dismantle the structures of hegemony? And I think when I work in museums, the first thing I do, and even when I make exhibitions is I walk in the space. I have to feel it.
And I think that's a very dancerly thing is to kind of understand the space to kind of think through what that can mean. And so I think when I start to make my exhibitions, it's about feeling the space first for myself. And then I bring my dancers into the space.
And then we kind of experiment. We play. And then I start to create a score. The score comes when I start to make notes and then build a structure. And then it gets more and more formulated. And then it becomes kind of like the thesis of what they do.
So for this piece, Returning to Before, we started to kind of create something, play, experiment, and then pick and choose things to kind of create the structure. So I'm really interested in the way that dance, perhaps, doesn't have a written language. But I use more poetics and things to kind of create a language. But then within that, I also use cameras to document, so it can have an archive.
But for me, it's always a starting point of working with my body in the space just sort of feeling it. And I think that's something that when I walked in the space, I was just kind of walking through these objects, kind of like learning them in a different way, kind of thinking about the different pathways that we would take. And I think that's sort of a method that I've been doing with all of my exhibitions in museums.
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