Emotional Gestures (2012-2013)

I used knitted garments to create physical limitations and employed dance improvisational techniques to begin to develop a gestural language. During these sessions, I found that emotions were easier to access and the body more readily to express itself when it was confined.  Our bodies are already inherently tied to our more base functions, to our more emotive tendencies, but limiters allow the mind to secede control more quickly to the body’s natural inclinations. By placing the body, the self, under stress, my body was able to vocalize itself in a more visceral way.

I believe dance is a place to illuminate our own physicality, to make us visible as irrational gelatinous bodies. The gestures created through theses stressors told a story I was unable to speak aloud. 

Painful jerky action that stemmed from the core of the body grew in size and intensity until the momentum and force were too much to contain. At the break there was a release of emotions held down within the center of the body. Each gesture was a building hiccup or glitch until the repressed energy exploded forcefully from the soul of the body, the gut, like a bottle rocket put under pressure. 

Bob Fosse believed that people sing when they are too emotional to talk, and dance when they are too emotional to even sing.[1] It only made sense, then, that I turned back to my roots in dance when I found myself physically unable to vocalize the dark roiling emotions that I had been holding back. Our written and spoken language had failed me, so I turned to making my own.

Depression’s greatest strength is its ability to make you unable to acknowledge its presence or ask for help. My body took over when language failed and told my story rhythmic cycling, of slow builds and emotional breaks, of repeating the same gesture over and over hoping that this time some other outcome will occur.

These GIFs capture the cycling and hiccuping gestures forever. The medium creates a file that loops infinitely, much like how the performer feels during the emotional gestural glitch. It feels like it will never end, that the cycle cannot be broken. The GIFS confront this fear by making it real.