ΙT'S THE END OF THE AMUSEMENT PHASE

In a dance marathon that spans the historical continuum, three women* regress between personal and collective history.

Focusing on the dancing body and using sound and poetry as its materials, the piece grapples with the notion of progress as the most exhausting linear narrative. In the wake of a technological and social revolution that ultimately did not happen, ΙT’S THE END OF THE AMUSEMENT PHASE attempts to speak of the present’s emotional history.

Three female dancers interact on stage with the past that lies ahead of us all and the future we have left behind. They engage in a dance that exhausts their emotional and physical resources. It is a choreography about the ambivalent relationship of the individual and collective body with history, about the link between progress and destruction, about dances of fun, pleasure, and propaganda.

Choreographer’s Note
Broadcasting from a place in the South that has never sent a rocket into Space and grew old with slow internet, I wish to compose a messy kinetic and sonic chronology of the collective feeling created by launching into Space and simultaneously diving into cyberspace for bodies floating like space debris, for spectacle as the most durable fetish.

I draw inspiration from the dialectic relationship between continuity and discontinuity in how history is portrayed, discussed, and experienced. I experiment with both forms of linear flow (the cinematic single-cam setup, the musical ison, timeline) and discontinuity (collage, mashup, and medley).

ΙT’S THE END OF THE AMUSEMENT PHASE is not another eschatology for use, nor is it another declaration of nostalgia for an exoticized past, but rather an acknowledgement that the experiment has thankfully failed. The end of the world has not yet come, and certainly not the end of history. The poetics of vertigo emerge as the most tender gesture in this hour of the fall.

CONTENT WARNINGS:
*The performance includes loud music, strobe lighting, and some vulgar language.