Lia Smith-Redmann, Libby Steckmesser, and Rae Zimmerli, “Wild Tongue: Between Form and Meaning in the Languages of Dance”
Mentor: Maria Gillespie, Dance
Oral Presentation 9am Union Cinema

This ongoing movement research project develops an embodied methodology and performance practice through auto-ethnography, embodied storytelling, and interdisciplinary performance. By translating personal narratives through spoken word, written text, and dancing, our inner physical vocabularies are made accessible to a broader audience. Pulling from the works of Chicana feminist scholar Gloria Anzaldúa and German philosopher Walter Benjamin, we synthesize traditional translation theories with decolonized and feminized ways of knowing. In particular, Alzaldúa’s ideas of nepantla, or the state of in-between, and mestizaje or mixed-race consciousness, a state of having contradicting identities, relate to our concern with translation as a liminal state. We are developing different methods of bilingual translation relevant to our explorations that move between literal and abstract translations. Each of our physical languages, informed by memory, personal experiences, and cultural context, becomes legible through writing prompts, spoken word, improvised movement, and structured dance scores, which provide flexible guidelines for performers. By applying each of these, we developed many repeatable movement practices and exercises that include the live scribing, vocal narration, and visual translation of our movement, moving between literal and poetic meaning. Our goal is not to contain or codify one specific meaning within movement but to reveal multiple meanings. Our research shows how dancing is both legible and specific to each dancer, and that culturally-informed beliefs about the body provide a fixed lens through which dance is understood and translated by viewers. Our work resists the notion that dance is ephemeral or illiterate, and instead provides evidence of the ways in which dance is a cultural engine and that our embodied states are expressive of intellectual discourse.