THE BODY AS A LASTING THING

This project may have started as a single poem about trinas (short for ballerina, an ironic name used to joke about a stereotypical ballerina), or in the Harvard Dance Project’s What Moves You, during which I said a poem aloud, or watching Thank You for More than You Know and Good Morning, a performance in the same theatre three years prior that dealt with the experience of being a dancer. Regardless of where it found its true origin, it was concretized as I began working on an English creative thesis in poetry, parts of which were included in the performance in the form of projections and recordings. The aim of the body as a lasting thing is use some poetry I wrote on the body as it lives and reconfigures, and, with some actual bodies, create dance as its complement. Its original structure was a series of solos, however it grew and shifted as we worked toward this goal. My hope was to show the audience both the movement and the poetry, but also how they connect. In my head they are irreversibly glued together, and this piece was a small window into that bind.