Video: Iki Nakagawa

colored shadow (2021)

Presented by Arts Society of Kingston (NY. US) June 11 + 12, 2021 and O+ Festival October 9, 2021 (NY. US)

Taking its departure from choreographer Elisabeth Motley’s lived experience of neurodivergence, Colored Shadow considers embodiments of seizure, psychosis and cognitive, and physical disability as original creativities. This 1st episode in Motley’s long-form practice-as-research offers a crip performance practice that resists categorizations of the body and proposes a broad and multiple disability representation. Solo dance scores emerging from medical archives are practiced in spontaneous co-creation with live projected film scores composed by Brent Felker. The projection design as a site of light and capture generates non-linear maps that decenter notions of compulsory time and space. Colored Shadow is dislocated from the theater in order to unsettle the territory of a stage/body. A rhizomatic sculpture created by artist Jillian Rose is utilized as a cartographic and modular performance space. The sculpture is deconstructed and reconstituted as a crip landscape with which dance + projectipn assembles mutually. Integrally contributing to this research is long-time collaborator Cory Nakasue who offers a non-traditional dramaturgy of astrology, poetics, and somatization. 

As a proposal for radical neurodivergent knowing, Colored Shadow uses rhizomatic procedures – in particular map-making – as a framework to (dis)organize. After ginger, asparagus, Lily of the Valley, and ant nests, rhizomes possess original cartographic capability. They do not follow traces of other structures and instead randomly chart a unique orientation through the earth. Similarly, Colored Shadow practices map-making to overwrite. It authors a new topography out of the archival charts, graphs, MRIs, and clinical notes connected to the choreographer’s hospitalizations and medicalization for a recurring brain disease. Colored Shadow as a performance practice produces the body as an active site of cultural contestation while prising open possibilities for all rhythms of neurological expressivity. 

“All the time shadows had to borrow the colors of the objects on which they would fall” (Mukhopadhyay, 2008: 21).

Funding/Support: This project was made possible, in part, through The Movement Research Artist-in-Residence Program, funded, in part, by the Jerome Foundation; Dance/NYC’s New York City Dance Rehearsal Space Subsidy Program, made possible by The Andrew M. Mellon Foundation; the Harkness Foundation for Dance; the Davis/Dauray Family Fund; and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Additional support/ funding provided by the Arts Society of Kingston, the Cornell Creative Arts Center, Dance/NYC’s Disability. Dance. Artistry. Dance and Social Justice Fellowship Program, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grants Covid-19 Fund.