Qilo
COMMUNITY CLASS
Saturday, September 26
10:30 - Noon
Somatic Research and Dance Lab
Sourcing experiential anatomy and developmental movement from BodyMind Centering®
Fundamentals: we will explore our internal sense of movement through hands-on partner work, sweat as we move across the floor in a flow of follow-the-leader, and improvise with each other and the space. A listening/sensing/moving dialogue between parts of our bodies and between body and space/floor/others.
Performance
Saturday, September 26
7:30p
a/ fam/ily/his/tory/of ur/ani/um m/inin/g in/new/me/xi/co: the body of remediation
Suggested donation: $10 at the door
Cash Credit Venmo
I started thinking about this piece 14 years ago when I spent a month helping my grandmother shred old business documents, mining claims, and stock certificates before she died. A year later, I inherited her 1970’s paper shredder and began to use it as a physical metaphor to process my complicated feelings about family secrets, white defensiveness, resource extraction, and deep love of family and land. This next version of the body of remediation starts with a sound score incorporating my deepening trans voice as instrument, a hazmat suit, and video projection using my body and movement as a way to process toxic family history. Sourced from site-specific movement research at the sealed-over Ambrosia Lake uranium mine/superfund site on Navajo Dine land in Grants, NM, where my grandfather’s involvement in uranium mines landed him in prison, the body of remediation troubles the myths of manifest destiny and resource extraction, using my body to somatically engage the epigenetic history of white settler colonialism. I dance to
untangle my inheritance.
“… environmental injustices, whether on Native lands or lands of other others, must always be viewed through the lens of settler colonialism. While the connections between the two forms of power are various, the body is a good place to start…” Traci Brynne Voyles, Wastelanding, Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country. 2015
“Land is that physical mass called our bodies.” Cherrie Moraga, The Last Generation, Prose and Poetry. 1993
Qilo Matzen dances and improvises, bringing somatic research and site-specific work to the stage, studio, and video. Qilo’s ongoing somatic movement practice provides a highly alive internal landscape and a resonant sense of space. He moves with strength, precision, intelligence, and intuitiveness, attuned with light, sound, breath, and gaze. Early studies with electronic music composers and experimental dancers inform Qilo’s compositions through a desire for new movement. Past projects include community-based movement theater pieces that re-imagine water systems and touring Europe and the Balkans with a collaborative performance about prison abolition. Current work includes a live performance/art installation that investigates family history and troubles the myth of manifest destiny, a dance solo of queer ecopolitics, and dance films that skew frame rate to reveal the embodied beauty of intangible digital mediums. Creeks, bathrooms and black box theaters set the stage for Qilo’s immersive and somatically informed performances. Collaborators include V. Norton, Zeph Fishlyn, Lisa Fay, paige starling sorvillo, Tessa Micaela, Jai Arun Ravine, Nina Haft, and The Water Underground. Qilo's education spans North Carolina's swamps, U. Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (BFA), The School for Designing a Society, Moving on Center, and Dynamic Embodiment®. A white trans dancer and bodyworker, Qilo grew up knee deep in a sweaty southern backyard drainage ditch, lives near Oakland’s Sausal Creek, and deeply appreciates all his teachers and Collaborators.