Patchwork: in progress
What is a quilt?
A quilt is a woman’s garden
fields of cloth
echoing the earth
harrowing—plowing
seeding
weeding
reaping
repeating
~Rhea Côté Robbins, “Wednesday’s Child”
This project emerged from a challenge, a promise, and a commitment I made to myself at the beginning of quarantine to document my solo dancing everyday as a practice in vulnerability, accountability, and self-love. I felt that the pandemic packed a punch to the gut: as a recent college graduate I was catapulted into a terrifying and unknown world, one where it felt unsafe and unethical to practice my craft in the ways I was trained. Understanding this profoundly monumental global and personal shift, I decided to create a personal living archive as witness to my growth during this time of upheaval and grief.
In my Zoom dance classes, I noticed themes emerging about lineage, preservation and evolution, memory, the intimacy of home-space, and vulnerability. I began to frame my dancing like a spatio-temporal patchwork quilt. While the world outside seemed a tumultuous and ever evolving tempest of rising caseloads and political protests, the mundanity of my routine at home felt like an endless wave of repetition, which manifested in my embodied research. I became interested in unveiling repetitive motifs and habits, asking myself: “what are the threads unifying the fabric of my body everyday? Is it possible to create transformation through repetition?” In a patchwork quilt, the pattern and form is the same: row after row of little squares and scraps sewn together. Yet each square vastly differs in color, texture, and size to become a unified whole. If each of my daily movement practices represents a fabric square, when weaved together, where do I notice the nuance of effort, rhythm, and emotion within the repetition? How does the patchwork of my dancing body fit together?
Patchwork quilts are passed down from generation to generation, often storing a collage of memories. Historically, patchwork quilting has represented a way for women to assemble and affirm their communal identities, situated within the practice of quilting bees. Dance is similarly an intrinsically communal practice, and quarantine reminds me as we gather, together yet apart, transmitting from the intimacy of our homes, that community is boundless, transcending geographical location and time. This documentation of my living dance archive has been a way to connect with and examine the patchwork that is my own dance lineage. What “ghosts” of ancestors and mentors, living and dead, are always present in my approach to movement? What memories, stories, and experiences are captured within the seams of my flesh?
My deepest gratitude to Nattie Trogdon and Hollis Bartlett, Jennifer Nugent, Brit Falcon, Stephanie Liapis, Aya Wilson, Albert Matthias, Maree ReMalia, and many others from whom I sourced my movement material and improvisational scores. Your wisdom and teaching has become part of the complex stitching of my patchwork body.