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Explorations of Memory: An Integrated Dance Perspective and Process

Disabled Artists Dance New Rituals of Grief & Renewal Through Dis/ordered Memories

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About

In a series of solo and collaborative movement explorations, disabled dancer Leslie Taub moves through resonances between her own cognitive impairment and her late father’s dementia; between her relearning to learn after brain injury and her young grandchildren’s joyful development. Artists who engage with and share in her explorations include musicians and fellow dancers—notably vocalist Tobaron Waxman, a versatile singer trained in Jewish liturgical music and shaped by their personal Jewish, queer, and trans histories, whose creative practice “contextualizes physical experiences of time as systems of inscription”; and  bomba dancer Luz “Lucy” Rosado, whose movement vocabulary, like Leslie’s, includes deeply personal lived experiences of seizure and release, physical and cognitive adaptation, and bodymind  remembering.Leslie—who describes herself visually as “a middle-aged, white femme with an expressive scarred face and gnarled, starfish-shaped hands,”—accompanies her collaborators through solo, duet, and trio improvisations, gradually building choreography that emphasizes asymmetry, texture, constraint juxtaposed to negative space, slowness, fragmentation, repetition, and violent punctuation. (Ultimately, individual dances will be pieced together in a cohesive, approximately 40-minute performance work.) Along the way, Leslie utilizes video and recorded text to document her process, including encounters with structural and attitudinal barriers to access to resources within physically integrated as well as mainstream dance., and development of forms and ideas that could only be generated by a disabled (or slow, damaged, delayed) mind.