with

WITH is a durational performance I made for Movement Research’s 2014 Spring Festival FALLOW TIME. Performed over several hours, WITH aimed to quietly disrupt the speed and activity in the space, slowly unfolding as other performances happened.

I had just returned home to New York City from Jakarta where I had my last visit with my grandmother before she passed away. To the backdrop of gamelan, WITH invoked my distant and tender lines of connection with my ancestors and Indonesia, a country where time moves much more slowly.

WITH includes preparing a space for performance, doing walking meditation and Butoh, and eventually connecting silently with individual audience members by offering them an intention. I chose a person in the crowd, wrote an intention for them onto a small slip of paper, and planted the intentions with a few echinacea seeds into a tiny pot of soil. I watered and delivered each pot to the person, telling them the plant would bloom in one year.

Photos of WITH performed at ISSUE Project Room | Photos by Aiden Simon

• February 16, 2015

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