Gathering Movements

My performance Level began as an effort to materialize and visualize my experience of vestibular dysautonomia. I have a chronic illness in which my autonomic system does not regulate my blood pressure, blood volume, and oxygen levels in relation to changes in position. This leaves me with “air hunger”: breathlessness and fatigue when I am forced into vertical positions. The world constructed in the image of ableism prioritizes a vertical body, a standing body, a tall adult body that is upright and in forward motion. My costume of levels creates a material parameter that rewards horizontality rather than verticality. The levels provide bubble feedback only for minor deviations from horizontal positions.  

In making this piece, it felt important to consider what I get from a live performance for an audience versus a performance for a camera. A performance for a camera, although still effortful, proves to be much more accessible for me. It can be replicated infinitely without the physical means of my body, and there is constant opportunity for pause. Even more saliently, the camera provides an incredible physical closeness that would not be available in a live performance. It made me revisit the closeness of lens and audio in haptic cinema. I wonder if this closeness has to do with the difficulty of translating sensation between bodies. Physical closeness may be the best option for approaching our threshold for communicating sensation across our physical separateness. 

Even in the most medically advanced technological spaces that I frequent as a patient, I am only asked to describe pain by assigning it a number. This vacant math loses so much in its translation. In this performance there is both a lot of pain — evidenced in my sick body — and also a lot of pleasure, and they blur and distort one another. While dancing, I am listening to a music playlist from a workshop that I initially developed in the Dancing Disability Lab at the University of California, Los Angeles called “Club Bed.” It is a guided workshop surrounding horizontality and access to club space as a disabled queer person while reimagining movement in relationship to a sick horizon line. It felt like an intuitive step to have the trace of this playlist in this performance. 

I am fortunate to create inside an ecosystem of immense support. I would like to give a special thanks to Ellery Bryan as the videographer of Level and Najee Haines-Follins’s support as the production assistant, as well as Geo McCandlish, who photographed my portrait.