Collaboration
BEYOND CONTROL is a new series of site-specific choreographies, a collaboration between Carolina Caycedo and Rebeca Hernandez. The choreographies include dancers incorporating and referencing different tactical movements used by police and SWAT teams for crowd and riot management, in what we call “a choreography of power”. The training of a body to control another body is a pivotal reference to think about body movement in relation to constriction and containment.
This series is part of Caycedo's ongoing research “BE DAMNED: Dams and Repression”, exploring the concepts of flow and containment through the historical, political, ecological, visual, and economic connotations and interrelations between social repression and the planning/construction of dams/reservoirs. Dams retain water by stopping the flow of a river. By analogy, repression interrupts the flow of social and community organization.
The performances are built upon the visual and theoretical relations between water dams and how they manage a body of water, and the physical, legal, and psychological containment of a social body, call it a crowd, a riot, a community organization, or an individual citizen.
BEYOND CONTROL was created as part of Carolina Caycedo's residency and exhibition at 18th Street Arts Center's Artist Lab Series, and Rebeca Hernandez's research as a resident of UCLA's Hothouse Dance Residency Program.
Performances took place at the 18th Street’s main gallery, Pieter Performance Space, UCLA's Glorya Kaufmann Hall and the Mexican Consulate of Los Angeles, and at the terminus of Pico Blvd and Santa Monica Beach.
More information: http://18thstreet.org/events/beyond-control-2.