Dance without Bodies

Drawing on her performance work with The Wooster Group and the ideas of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, choreographer Koosil-ja presents a new dance work built around two simultaneous, yet spatially disconnected solos that question the fundamental role of “presence” in performance and allude to an understanding of the “self” as a subject always in process. Created in collaboration with dancer Melissa F. Guerrero, Benton-C Bainbridge (video), and Geoff Matters (music, video, and software design), Koosil-ja’s “live processing” performance method requires the dancers to synthesize, in real-time, the action depicted in multiple videos and then to generate, from these randomly combined sources, new movement that is neither pure improvisation nor set choreography, yielding unique results each evening.