photo by Jane Rennick

SEMESTER

SEMESTER is the word-for-word and equation-for-equation delivery of a semester’s worth of quantum physics lectures. The performer has no idea what they're saying, although they know exactly what they're saying; the lecture was reproduced by memorizing the text phonetically alongside the the movement of the chalk on the blackboard. The piece thereby foregrounds the recombinant language and cadence of the lecture as poetry, and the hieroglyphics of the equations for their visual aesthetics. Thus the act of "performing" knowledge uncouples from conventional understanding, divorcing the symbols and language from their bundled informational content. If embodied performance generally and dance specifically can index a regime of discipline on the body--through compliant bodies' surrender to outside forces--SEMESTER proposes a choreographic mode of knowledge and its performance, devaluing conventional standards of expertise and mastery.

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Photos from workshop performance at MIT (left) and Fresh Oysters Performance Research (right)