Nocturne (2012-14)

In Nocturne, audiences encounter a low platform the scale of a bed, where a single performer slowly shifts from side to side as if amidst restless sleep. A video projection adjacent to the bed displays a ‘live feed’ of the performer, but a second body appears with her. This virtual body slowly shifts and rolls in response to the live performer’s movements in a durational piece over two hours. A meditation on absence and loss, the piece aims to capture a somatic understanding of the memory of another. 

On a formal level, the piece re-thinks the meaning of vertical and horizontal, two-dimensional and three-dimensional, subjectivity and representation. As the viewer’s eyes shift from the horizontal plane where live ‘real’ bodies shift and breathe, they glance up to a two-dimensional picture plane on the wall, where the bodies suddenly float and swim, tumbling down the frame, changing a sense of gravity. 

Through a casual intimacy that cycles through rolling and stillness, the piece tracks the traces of the body, imagining the marks it leaves, and the memory of someone else’s movements. Subjectivity and the body “are clearly not monads or self-mirroring singularities, but packs, open collectives, continuous processes of unfolding, multiplicities” impacting one another, even in unconscious ways (André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement).