From artist interviews (click for PDF) and events (summarized on the gallery's website), to Closer Look slide shows of some of the works in the gallery (see Katya Grokhovsky), the pandemic closure made me rethink what I meant by exhibition, public, participatory, and even curatorial. It became an expanded field of operations.

One addition during the pandemic was a 360-degree tour created by Exeter’s Communications office.

I hoped the 360 software could allow a score or narrative to be included within the structure. At one point I researched how to overlay AR or VR on top of the view. The limitations of the software permitted only the minimum of text. 360 tours cannot (yet) capture the encounters, overlaps, and intersections that our bodies are so adept at sensing and navigating. You have no peripheral vision. In Being & Feeling, there was no way to experience the pleasure of playing with your own reflection in the mirrors of Lauren Gillette’s Things I Did, become a shadow participant in front of Tobias Rud’s But Jane was deaf projection, or sit down and read Stephanie Misa’s Transplant.

However, the tour did provide another way for people to access the exhibition component of the project, and it was an important step forward for the gallery. I have great appreciation for the effort.

These types of platforms are evolving quickly to become more dynamic and participatory, such as through gaming controls, the integration of responsive software, or the ability to add audio, video, and multiple views at once. At that point, the curatorial and artistic potential will be significant.

What moves in spite of it all?

How did ideas and actions move to create ways for the Being & Feeling project to be experienced and encountered despite physical inaccessibility and the inability to gather in person?

Establishing Moves

It took me time to release my attachment to prior programs, and to process the loss of the vibrant exchanges and iterative curatorial expansions I had imagined would take place in the gallery. I decided fairly quickly that I did not want to duplicate those programs, but was uncertain about how to continue.

My initial concerns were centered on issues of translation. Was I attempting to retranslate one event to another format? Is translation about fidelity or the responsibility to mirror some singular, original text? What if the text is neither singular nor even original, but already plural, mediated through multiple minor gestures of sending and receiving, recombined each time by the differences in situation and context?

I was curious if translation could be a process of moving one thing aside to make room for many other things. Perhaps it was not so much about the loss of detail, but an accumulation that integrated the original and the unknown multiplicities. In the Center for Artistic Research’s “A Post Doc Art Event exploring translation in, between, and beyond artistic disciplines and media,” presenter Kirsi Monni proposed that translation “reveals latent possibilities,” and the “chain” or sequence of translation moves when “one piece generates many different iterations. (1)

In order to let things move, I had to let things go.

(1) Kirsi Monni, “Version and Per-Version: Acts of Creative Translations in Compositional Practices” (presentation, A Post Doc Art Event exploring translation in, between, and beyond artistic disciplines and media, University of the Arts Theater Academy, Helsinki, Finland, 2 March 2019).

Transitioning and reorienting programs for Zoom was not simply a change in format—a shift from face-to-face to electronic. It felt like unknown territory. The challenges of working from home, the anxiety about job security, the escalating racialized violence around the U.S., and concerns about the future all had a profound impact on people’s ability to function.

Recalling my conversations with Shannon, Jeremy, and others, I approached the shift to Zoom with a motivation to foster feelings of inclusion and welcome, discovery and connection. I needed to reground curating in its etymological roots of care more explicitly. I did not want to cancel the project. It was needed now, more than ever.

We kicked off the series with Katya Grokhovsky on 7 May 2020. We continued the events with Sachiko Akiyama, Tobias Rud, and Lauren Gillette on 14 May, Stephanie Misa and Riikka Talvitie on 21 May, and Cheryle St. Onge and Andrew Fish on 29 July.

Each discussion had a series of introductory slides and a conversation score. The presentations were enlightening and informative. Audiences were appreciative of the opportunity to interact with the artists and with each other. Perhaps we were all closer than we would have been in the gallery. The Zoom format allowed us to be digitally proximate, especially if the intimacy of adjacent squares could be a stand-in for proximity across geographies, time zones, and desires.

There was a range of choreographic, gestural, and rhythmic conditions using Zoom. You could trace patterns of speech, repetitions in gesture, and various adjustments to displays. People turned their cameras on and off. Some people had virtual backgrounds, and well-positioned lighting. Others were backlit. Some sat very close to the cameras, others at an angle or at a distance, alone or with family members and pets. People spoke, periodically or often, or were silent. They put questions in the chat, or used the ‘raised hand’ feature, which was often overlooked in our effort to manage this new and dispersed attentional landscape. The constellation of micro movements was generated by people wanting and willing to engage in whatever way they could.

At that point, everything felt like an experiment. The future of the gallery was uncertain. I did not know how the programs would proceed, or if future projects, like those in Helsinki, would occur. For a few short months in the spring, the not-knowing, the not-arriving to a not-predetermined end, provided an open space to experiment and explore together.

Earlier in 2019, I had invited Jon Sakata, a frequent collaborator, to create a work for the project, which he did with the student club Democracy of Sound (exeter)/DOS(e).

For Being & Feeling, the installation ex(i/ha)le included a large mylar structure with projections, sound, and other components installed inside one of the side galleries. It was intended to be a space for exploration, sensory experience, and sonic, tactile, and textural immersion. It was a work that invited, or even required, audience participation.

Even apart from the pandemic-driven closure, ex(i/ha)le was not completely open. You could not enter the mylar structure itself. In this room within a room, you could walk around the periphery, navigating a tight path with obstacles of foam, projections, and sounds thrown in the path. Your experience would be tactile and external, introspective and internal. A solitary experience and a multiple one, extended by the polyvocality of the soundscape.

Now that the installation was literally inaccessible in a physical sense, did that preclude participation? What do we mean when we use the word participation within a gallery context? What is assumed when we say the audience completes a work through their direct bodily engagement? Does this privilege only certain types of works (for example, installations, but not paintings)? Did it assume only certain types of movement?

I was forced to take a closer look at these assumptions, and eventually abandon them.

How and what to translate—how let go of a singular concept to allow the multiple to unfold—within these new pandemic conditions?

Dustin Schuetz, who had played a critical role in the piece’s installation (along with Dale Atkins), was willing to act as guide. During our rehearsal on Zoom the week before the event, we considered how much narrative or description to provide to the audience beforehand, how to introduce the event, and how Dustin would enter and interact with the work.

The May 29 program became Multiplying the Collaborative. The live walk-through including other members of the design and installation team, and poet and Exeter faculty and colleague Willie Perdomo (whose voice and poetry are part of the soundscape). Jon and I were in our respective Zoom locations, and Dustin, smartphone in hand, was in the gallery, acting as our collective avataric extension.

There were lags, glitches, and moments of discomfort.

We gave special consideration to the gaps: when the screen would be "filled" and when it would be black or blank, when we might speak, or when we might make space for silence or pauses, which pushed against the ingrained reaction that things need to be filled in order to be communicative.

The appeal of these moments for artists are quite different than their appeal for audiences. I recalled dramaturg Jeremy Stoller’s question to me during one of our early conversations: “How comfortable are you with confusion?”

We hoped that the event would evoke not just the external sensation of moving through the crinkly mylar room with projected surfaces and sounds, but that this space would become one of interiority as well: the audience could take this experience as an internal mental state, a journey through inner landscapes, memories, and voices. The Zoom squares functioned as each audience member’s interiority and exteriority, depending on how they modulated their presence and attended to the experience and to each other.

After the event, I sent each audience member a personalized piece of the installation—individualized screen shots that Jon had made for those in attendance. There was no other accompanying narrative for these digital offerings. We merely wanted the audience to continue to sense the "afterimage" of the event and the piece, within their own time and within their own mental and physical spaces.

This experience allowed me to step back from the solitary conductor mode I felt I had begun to embody in other Zoom events, where I was compelled to orchestrate the elements much more tightly. The gesture of moving back or alongside, to become one of many bodies in an ensemble, made room for something else to emerge.

By May, everyone had become more comfortable with Zoom. Why not try something else?

Stephanie Misa was originally scheduled come to campus April to participate in a variety of programs. Once it became clear that everything was closed (galleries, flights, borders), we considered other options. In lieu of a planned live performance in the gallery, she recorded a work-in-progress version of a performative lecture, Filipinos, Cannibalism, and Mothers Dancing on Tongues, in Vienna.

In the meantime, in the U.S., I experimented with bringing Stephanie’s performance into the Lamont Gallery via digital means. I imagined that we could live stream it. I sprawled alone on the gallery floor, testing various projections on the wall and laptop screenings. Jon Sakata and Jung Mi Lee offered to sit in the gallery as the audience. We could live broadcast that scenario—Jon and Jung Mi watching a screen, while we watched a screen of this watching. This re-atomized, digital displacement would echo the themes of interiority and exteriority and the dislocation and relocation of Stephanie’s voice—conditions that the exhibition addressed and that the pandemic reinforced.

While fruitful for experimentation, these plans did not support where Stephanie was in her artistic research process.

We decided instead that this was an opportunity to talk about the pursuit of artistic research, and the process behind using research to develop works. We sent out preliminary information beforehand, including a link to Foe by Brendan Fernandes, and an excerpt from Brandon LaBelle’s Lexicon of the Mouth (click for PDF). The audience then viewed the piece on their own through Vimeo through a password-protected link. Subsequently, we held a live Zoom discussion with Stephanie that focused on the process-oriented nature of this piece.

How would the sound and movement carry, and carry us? Stephanie’s act of eating the presentation notes (using edible paper). Her invitation and provocation to eat a Filipino cookie, an object of critique that linked to her broader investigation of orality, identity, and subjectivity. How would investigations of diasporic bodies, intersectionality, and empowerment rewrite the narratives of the institutional setting?

My own preparation for this event including writing another conversation score. While it reads as a script, it was not used as such. Instead, it was a way for me to process the ideas provoked by the piece, reflect on its context within the exhibition, and acknowledge the (multiple) conditions of our participation.

The choreographic ethos of the curatorial project facilitated the creation of new work. Having the piece as a recorded performative lecture enabled engagement to occur through alternate modes. The event—itself an accumulation of the process, the performance, and the discussion—granted exquisite attention to the sociopolitical and emotional materiality of language, its embodied force, and the very personal ways we language ourselves, our histories, and our futures.

“Do you think we could do a burlesque piece?” asked one of the student gallery proctors.

This was back in January 2020. The student and I walked and talked in and out of the gallery's many spaces.

“Burlesque? Hmmm … sure, say more.” I thought about the resurgence of interest in burlesque as equal parts empowerment, representational strategy, and gesture of resistance. “What draws you to burlesque, and how do you think it might widen the conversation?” I asked. “Would we have a performance? A workshop? Let’s see where we can go!”

We identified possible student performers, determined when they could access the gallery for rehearsals, and discussed how people could launch their own performance experiments. We explored ways to work with the gallery floor plan, as well as the outside corridor. We touched on the possibility of creating a processual dance work that would move into other spaces on campus. Engaging the audience with movement might be a way to promote sensory and interpersonal awareness. We came up with a name: Moving Together.

Moving Together was to be a collaborative and iterative series of rehearsals and events as part of Being & Feeling (Alone, Together). The first iteration would be in the Lamont Gallery. Screenings and performances would take place at the MUU Gallery later in the year.

Shortly after the conversation with the gallery proctor, students left for spring break. We learned a few days later that they would not return due to the pandemic. The gallery, along with the rest of the campus, would be closed to the public

Moving Despite

The student and I continued our exchange by email. We sent out a call for work, knowing that because of the stress and confusion in the early months of the pandemic that we might not be able to offer a full program. We decided to try it anyway.

While a fully developed program did not materialize, three students, one employee, and Kara Fili and Shannon Humphreys eventually submitted pieces. We promoted their choreographic responses on VImeo. Choreographers and audience members gathered for a public conversation on Zoom on 15 July. During the event, as the choreographers discussed their pieces, I presented still images from the works and photographs of the exhibition. Audiences could also engage with the works through the choreographer interviews (click for PDF).

“Provide Five Movements”: Fledge

Shannon Humphreys worked with filmmaker Chris Engles for their choreographic response to the exhibition in their film Fledge. The piece represented the type of work I hope that choreographic thinking generates—the cultivation of unexpected outcomes.

Fledge was created in collaboration with a community of people who submitted movement instructions or scores by social media, text, and email. Shannon collected, learned, interpreted, and performed the material. These movements form the basis of the choreography in the film.

Shannon was inspired in part by Kwame Alexander’s If Trees Can Keep Dancing So Can I, a collaborative poem compiled from various submissions in response to another poem about grief by Nancy Cross Dunham.

Shannon solicited collaborators to provide five movements with the following instructions (1):

• Movement can be dance or not
• You may make up something new, or give me a piece of some choreography that you made previously
• Your five movements may or may not take inspiration from any or a combination of these words: being, feeling, alone, together, blue
• Send me your five moves in any way you wish. Some suggestions: tag me in the comments of a video that is already posted somewhere and give me the timestamp of the first of the five movements you want me to use; describe the movements in words or drawings; send me a “score” to follow a la Cage/Cunningham; send me a list of tasks; send me dance notation (I can read Labanotation and Benesh--but it has been a long time so I may take artistic license); teach me your movements on a video chat; and of course you can make a video of yourself doing the movements and send it to me

The final piece became a way for multiple bodies to occupy the space together, through thought, gesture, and arrangement, across and despite emotional and geographical distance. The individual desires of the contributors were collectively embodied in the piece through Shannon’s arrangement and interpretation: themes of visibility and invisibility, connection and isolation, confusion and care, were dynamically translated into dispersed, yet connected experiences.

(1) Shannon Humphreys, instructions, in exhibition materials, Being & Feeling (Alone, Together), Lamont Gallery, Phillips Exeter Academy, 2020.