Where do we congregate? It used to be public spaces like churches, parks and theaters. Today, we can come together, for most anything, in the virtual realm. How do we create community in this virtual realm? I look to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement for direction. BLM has been able to galvanize large groups of people separated by time and space. This phenomenon is at once aligned with the framework of civil rights organizing of the 1960s while also progressing the model for social justice activism. How can support be transmitted and received via the internet? With these questions in mind, I seek to explore how to cultivate community while not occupying the same physical space. 

Liminal personae...Threshold people. 

“Communitas: a Latin noun referring to an unstructured community in which people are equal, or to the very spirit of community.” Wikipedia 

“...all liminality must eventually dissolve, for it is a state of great intensity that cannot exist very long without some structure to stabilize it... either the individual returns to the surrounding social structure...or else liminal communities develop their own internal social structure - ‘normative communitas.’” Victor Turner

Using the decentralized, democratized leadership model used by BLM, my dancers and I are working towards creating a choreographic community, connecting Los Angeles to Sacramento. We seek to integrate dance performance, holographic and telepresence technologies. We are dealing with binaries: Chaos/Order, Belonging/Detachment, Nativeness/Foreignness.

This project has been in process since 2017. We have engaged with texts by Gloria Anzaldua, Victor Turner and Martin Buber. Dancers has conducted research with family members, some of which are immigrants. These interviews have greatly impacted the direction of the work thus far. The following screenshots are from rehearsals in January 2018.