Makisig Akin
We are (nothing) Everything
Contemporary Dance
Residenz: 12.09. bis 25.09.
We Are (nothing) Everything is a new trio dance work with two dancers and a live musician. Through performance we cultivate impossible conditions as an invitation to elusive spaces where desire, guilt, grief, and love intersect. What can we do together that we cannot do alone? It will spill and rumble and quake.
What does it mean to intimately be together right now in the wake of and in the midst of multiple converging global crises? The core of this work is a love centered survival practice of time travel/communion/habitat/performance/ritual where everything deserves to breathe. Through performance we insist on holding the complexity and paradox of being socialized female bodies who are queer and racialized. Our skin is an indicator of positionality. Sometimes we share a body and sometimes we splinter into the ether — we simultaneously elevate each other and take each other down. We morph the definition of being human and being human in relationship with other species. We shift/slip from lying under the stars to a nightclub to a fighting ring to nesting to a den. We tap into realms outside of mundane existence through astrological systems and galactic sequin portaling. It demands a quality of attention, from both performers and audience, that punctures assumptions.
This work utilizes a stark environment that focuses on our dancing, feeling bodies. It takes place on mats. Internal and external soundscapes drive the gravity of the work.
We follow stable and unstable choreographic trajectories to find momentum. We incorporate grand gestures that go nowhere, bonding/grappling/napping/fainting, professing love, contact improvisation, climbing mountains, boy band/striptease choreography, and hot sweaty dancing. There is a kind of bonding that is only possible through bathing in each other’s sweat. We are wet and pleased. It is truth telling. It is a gift. How many ways can we move – move with – be moved by – each other? What is leftover?
This world encapsulates the story of a relationship — siblinghood/loverhood/sisterhood/personhood exist synchronously. We organize through permission in order to vision and imagine. Intimacy facilitates straddling and queering notions of violence, care, pleasure, play, and gender. It is a visitation of different versions of living/becoming/being that exist for fleeting moments of time. The work invites expanding dominant notions of truth; a queer Noah’s arc — two by two as an ode for our future ancestors. It is a reimagination of the creation story. With patience, tenderness, and prayer the work epitomizes the multiple ways that love can manifest. We embody the wildest dreams of our queer ancestors.
Choreography and Performance: Anya Cloud and Makisig Akin
