ARCHIVED IN FLESH
Contrary to choreographed movements, Club and Street Dances are originally performed in a freestyle manner. This means that the dancer's movements are developed and executed through a spectrum of concepts provided by a dance culture and are then varied by an individual. Through this approach on learning, an empowering ownership is created where a performer is able to possess the movement and add it to their body’s library. These movements appear in the moment of freestyle, but only if transferred into muscle memory beforehand. This is achieved through drills, where a motion sequence is repeated over and over again until the pattern becomes flesh and blood. Through passing on heritage as an embodied practice, the body functions as an archive. Within freestyle the mind can draw from these cultivated archives freely because the muscle memory recalls the movements as they were trained. Without having to focus on any technique, the mind can creatively express whatever is triggered by the music. In that manner, Street and Club dances express the lived experience of an individual as well as the communal autobiography.
The fragments of the analog piece can be seen as a layered archive of muscle tissue, constructed by repetitive movement sequences. The hand-dyed shades of skin tones unfold in a fan aesthetic inspired by the props used in Waacking. The stacked layers of pleats reflect the asymmetrically shaped bodies that organically emerge through an individual's physical abilities and limitations.
Material: cotton & polyester, magnets, sodium silicate
Dancer: Miranda Amaechi Rumerstorfer
Videography: David Panhofer
Music: Demuja (AT) – All my Troubles