Art & Design | Mechalogica

For course Entanglement of Movement and Meaning: The Architect, Spatial Perception and the Technological Body taught by Krzysztof Wodiczko and Ani Liu at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (2019)

In contemporary dance solo Mechalogica, I observe several ideas that were prevalent in Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus performance work. These include form, order, and mechanic movement. Observing how his dancers appeared dehumanized at times in service to these ideas, I am curious if Schlemmer was perhaps suggesting the augmentation or replacement of the body with machines. In Mechalogica, I explore this observation by mechanizing the body toward present-day ideas of humanoids and cyborgs.

For the creation, I used Oskar Schlemmer’s Diagram of the Gesture Dance as a springboard for movement generation as well as videos of the Triadic Ballet as a reference to his movement vocabulary. My intention was not to reinterpret the Gesture Dance or choreograph a new dance based on the Triadic Ballet vocabulary, but rather to use my own movement language to explore the ideas observed in these works - namely, form, order, and mechanic movement.

(Videography by Maggie Janik)