Candelario, R., (2023) “Violences, Aftermaths, and Family, or: How to Make Dances in this Body?”,Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies 42. doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/conversations.3647
In the last edition of the Dance Studies Association: Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies Dance journal, scholar Rosemary Candelario writes a partially biographical essay about her and her family’s experiences around anti-Asian violence, and anti-Filipino violence in particular. She writes:
As Karen Shimakawa has shown, the abjection of Asian Americans is both a process and condition of American national identity formation in which Asian Americans are both “constituent element and radical other” (2002, 3, emphasis in original). In other words, “America” is defined through the (ongoing) exclusion of Asian (Americans) who thus constitute a necessary part of that same identity. For Filipinx Americans, Lucy Burns clarifies that it is a process more specifically of “visibility and misrecognition” (2013, 4).
The creation process for Begin Again often grapples with violence, both implicitly and explicitly. Bennyroyce explores images of loneliness, disconnection, isolation, and even unhoused-ness through the lens of their own related, intersectional experience. These various kinds of violence are all very much contextualized in an atypical, pandemic-based state of affairs, and are rendered with an emphasis on the performers’ interior lives, as well as Benny’s. There are images relating to protest, which in many ways could be considered almost timeless on first encounter, but reference specific instances, especially those taking place in Seattle. Public protest always demands that protesters place their bodies in space, time, and energy in places visible to observers, and these kinds of actions are embodied in Begin Again. But, within Begin Again, the peculiarly isolating experience of the pandemic is layered in, as no protest’s embodiment is rendered as collective, but rather, as singular embodied action that could take place either within or outside of a group. Here, Benny plays with ideas like Candelario’s reference to Lucy Burns notions on visibility, and the layered, individuated images of solo protesters trouble the viewers understanding of their own recognition, or “misrecognition,” of what they see or have seen.
- Marie