Star Mountain Amphitheater, Vermont
Performance: Lucia Gagliardone, Lydia Roe, Emma Dewey, Lucy Sydel, Brigid Armbrust
Sound design: Lucia Gagliardone
Like Water weaves together individual and collective explorations as we engage with the intimate experience of seeing and being seen as full, raw beings. Leaning on the imagery of water, this dance contends with the messy process of dwelling in our bodies, together and alone, and how this self-realization is translated into expressions of love and healing towards the self and each other. The process of dwelling in our own bodies through this dance, like water dwells, builds on Tim Ingold’s “Dwelling Perspective”. Ingold shows that the “building perspective”—that we must build the world before living in it—is a fallacy. In fact, we are dwelling always, we exist and construct simultaneously. This process happens in each reincarnation of Like Water. My movement investigation began in a journey I took to the Muelle del Alma in Chiloé, Chile, where the pacific ocean’s water encouraged in me an improvisation in which I saw an intimate fullness within. As the dance grows and evolves, I continue to be drawn to water as a lifeforce, its ever-moving ephemerality coexisting with a deep power to shape, change, and hold space as its own body. Water speaks to the living nature of the movement in this dance, as well as the renewed task of witnessing and opening ourselves to being witnessed at each reiteration. Over the duration of Like Water, we discover our bodies as they dwell in this movement river, honoring each other and honoring the water itself.
Lucia Gagliardone 