Echoes Project Series Statement
Echoes is an evolving body of work that visualizes the temporal languages of dancers’ movements through experimental modes of drawing. At the core of these movements, dancers channel their personal narratives with the lineages and histories of their disciplines, remaining in conversation with the materials they move upon and the spaces they move within. As a visual artist whose foundation is the language of drawing and whose practice exists in context to a lineage and history of drawing, Echoes honors and communicates the relationship between visual art and dance. The work offers an enshrined representation of dancers’ energies, movements, and lifetimes in indelibly visualized moments connected to the larger histories from which they have evolved. It is a conversation honoring genres of dance through new, hybrid forms of image making, incorporating live performance and multidisciplinary works which share the process and intimate reality therein. Echoes seeks to honor and offer space to the interwoven threads imbued in the work for current and future generations to experience in a way active performance alone cannot. The work exists as a space for the essence and energy of bodies in motion which transcend our two- and three-dimensional perspectives into a fourth dimension of resonance. As a foundational starting point, Echoes is connected to the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triangle area of North Carolina from which I was raised in a community of dancers, Duke University, the American Dance Festival, New York City, and thus a broader history of arts, culture, and society from which all of this is born of.
Each collaboration in the larger Echoes series focuses on different dancers, lineages of dance, and ways in which the lineages of art making I have grown out of can evolve to suit the collaboration wherein to capture this energy or movement. Each piece starts with physical sculptural objects which are changed by the dancer’s movements, and in time become accompanied by a range of multimedia works including video, sound work, and others, which when exhibited will guide the viewer through a full multidisciplinary experience.
It is important to note that while we come across stories of awakening, empowerment and liberation in the histories of dance and art, we also confront realities of injustice, inequity, pain, colonialism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, land theft, and imbalance by looking at the past and present with an honest and critical lens. It is the intention of this work to embody a space and time upon which dancers can fully and freely explore what they feel moved by, on materials that have been considered for this experience. The work changes the tangible and metaphysical makeup of the materials in use, the space and narratives being moved within, and the energies in collaboration moving forward. It is an alchemical, in many ways spiritual happening, creating space and a vehicle for dynamic shift in time which can then be revisited in a range of forms, offering pathways of new possibilities, while also honoring the past, the elders, the energies of resistance and community therein.
From Here - Multidisciplinary Performance Commissioned by Duke University, presented by the Nasher Museum of Art, co Sponsored by American Dance Festival and Cassilhaus June 22, 2022
For the work titled From Here, a grant from Duke Arts has supported a physical piece of art, the creation of which involves a collaboration between Tap dancers Byron Tittle and Michelle Dorrance (both of Dorrance of Dorrance Dance NYC) and visual artist John Felix Arnold. The piece is constructed from reclaimed materials intentionally sourced with the input of Tittle and Dorrance––from the Triangle area and New York City, respectively––to represent the creators’ geographic origins, as well as the history of both the dance and art mediums. The movements of the dancers and their taps have created a record of their languages, stories, and expression. Drawn, carved, chiseled, and stamped into the art object, they leave behind a living visual memory along with the resonance and essence of each performer as connected to the deeper history of tap, and it’s vital importance in the history of America as an art form, cultural influence, and a form a resistance. It exists simultaneously as a piece of visual art pushing notions of experimental art making, drawing historical nods to past unions of movement and visual arts practice throughout art history.
The dancers have explored the materiality, sound and presence of the wood in transforming the surface. Their movements have been captured in the piece through marks made by their taps, evoking and creating a conversation with the history of the tap dance form, situated between the North and the South. In this sense, the project also represents the geographies of its creators’ lives: Arnold and Dorrance are Triangle natives, and Tittle was raised in New York, where all three live and work. The piece exists as a living document — a transformative moment and reflection on the intersections of art, dance, and the social and physical environments in which we live.
The relationships and lifelong narrative intersections that exist between the three artists in this work is also a driving element of its core purpose. It exists as a window to view how we embrace and respond to history collectively in ways which shift energies that blocked us from community and empowerment. The work pushes the possibilities of our art forms, our power of expression, forward in relation to our elders and the spaces we grow from and come to share. The idea of unspoken discourse, in communicating through intuitive means, sharing concepts that are fundamental to the human spirit and deepening perception through action, exists as the foundation of Tap dance and Art making. At the same time, the conversations and rigor of study, listening, and critical thinking that has gone into the lifelong journeys of artistic discovery each artist has championed, is a ground for building and shaping together in the moment through collaborative multidisciplinary work. All of this goes further in the intersections of their lives in relation to American Dance Festival, Duke University, Cassilhaus, and the Nasher Museum, as the sum of all of these parts has created the ground for a moment of collaborative language to evolve in a space that itself has worked to shift the conversations of our present day away from the dominant white-centric heteronormative patriarchal narrative that has violently shaped history, and toward possibilities which this work directly engages and pushes forward.
- John Felix Arnold 2022