The Gray Shape of Wasp’s Nests

Video Projection, Mapping, 2019

Choreography: Simone Ferro in collaboration with the performers

A collaboration with Simone Ferro’s Washington Park Collaborative Project and the Student Undergraduate Research Fellowship program. An act in appropriation, history, and the translation of memory. Projected photographs distort through screens and onto hanging doors. Shapes form into faces, then deteriorate once more. A metaphor for the transience of memory. All photographs were provided by the dancers and their families.

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Department of Dance

Winterdances: Refuge

February 1- 3 2019

Mainstage Theatre

Milwaukee WI

Video Description: Projected ontop of a large, transparent screen on a theater stage, large black and white boxes appear and disappear, moving kinetically. Dancers turn, twist, partner, and gesture behind the screen as the projected boxes morph and change shape. Eventually, geometric boxes turn into small balls, moving more frantically as the spheres form distorted faces and family photographs. Images dissolve and move into one another seamlessly, creating a portrait of abstraction and movement. The screen ascends into the stage rafters, and the original photographs, unobstructed, are projected on the back wall. The dancers continue to move, abstractly recreating gestures from the photographs on stage. The dance and projection ends as the dancers are in community, hand in hand, mirroring the childhood photograph projected behind them.