CorpoReality

My heart's aflame, my body's strained, but god I like it

This past Friday night was CorpoReality, our second big production as Embodied Art Dance. It was a free show held at the Reece Museum at ETSU as part of their Embodying Culture: Women in Appalachia exhibit, performed in the gallery itself. We performed four all new dances, two of which included a good friend we frequently dance with, and we had two additional spoken word acts from other friends included.

We opened with an improv dance to Me and the Devil by Soap&Skin, dancing around an installation in the gallery with a ball of yarn. Early in rehearsals, it was determined that improv with the four of us and that yarn was a little too chaotic. Being really bad at improv in the first place, I immediately decided to cut myself out and came up with the idea of maybe posing in the middle, getting wrapped in the yarn, while drawing or painting. It took a few rehearsals to work out what to draw and how to do it, but I decided depicting the tree and the dancers would be the most interesting thing.

The mask wasn't my idea, but it served the purpose of hiding my makeup for my next act, which took place after a lovely little spoken word performance. After a quick costume change, I performed in a duet with Eva, inspired by a Lauren Whipple painting in the exhibit titled I Was Starting to Think That it Would Be Over. My talent as a dancer is in being weird and inhuman, so performing as (not) a deer embodying someone else’s trauma to Carrion Flowers by Chelsea Wolfe came pretty naturally! It’s the most intense act I’ve been a part of, too.

A solo improv dance by Devorah, set to Mitski and inspired by a friend’s painting in the exhibit followed, then another spoken word performance about pottery.

Our finale was a group number set to Lera Lynn’s cover of Wolf Like Me, a piece that Eva had partially choreographed last year for the dance fusion class she teaches and that we knew immediately would fit into the show before coming up with anything else. It was the most difficult, elaborate piece, and compared to the others it’s the most jubilant, entirely different from anything else I’ve performed. It’s very communal, and for me there’s this feeling of belonging that I have rarely experienced. It’s also become one of my favorite songs.

I realized I follow a cool progression through this show: from mysterious masked figure, to a wild animal embodying trauma, to actually being human. And dancing in a corset and skirt was just incredible? It’s the most feminine I’ve felt, even if the corset wouldn’t stay up.

After getting changed, I led a half hour long figure drawing session with the other performers modeling, two of whom had never posed before, and we provided materials for the audience to join us. I was out of practice, half the pens I had on me were dying, but it was a sublime way to end things. You can see my drawings in my Patreon.

We went out for Mediterranean food after cleaning up and changing, and on the way home I drove through a sobriety checkpoint. The cop at my car saw my mask and commented on how weird it was. I held it up and went “oh yeah I was just in a dance performance,” and he just awkwardly laughed and waved me on. I crashed pretty hard after that and spent yesterday being useless and lazy. I’m still very new to dance and performing: it always feels so surreal when a show is over, and I get into a weird headspace afterwards. We spent months planning and rehearsing and promoting a show that was one night only, lasted only an hour, for a small audience made up mostly of friends and family. It’s so different from a drawing, painting, or comic. We have video of each act, but I can’t bring myself yet to look at that to edit and post, mostly because I have a hard time watching myself. I’ll get over that and fix those up eventually though.

I actually submitted a painting to this exhibit last year and got rejected, so getting to dance and draw in it several months later feels like I pulled off some kind of con or heist, even if it was just briefly for one night. I’m still not sure how I wound up here in my life, crafting and dancing and making art with friends in spaces I never thought I’d be a part of. It doesn’t feel real sometimes, but I’m incredibly grateful and hope to continue to keep moving my body and making things with these amazing people.