gently divine, violently disorienting is an interdisciplinary, design-led performance piece that examines the collaboration between technology and the performer as co-authors.
Inspired by Legacy Russel’s “Glitch Feminism”, GDVD depicts the ways queer individuals can manifest their own ideas of becoming by abstracting the ways they are perceived. Using live camera work, projection, and a digital “loop-pedal,” the performers create compositions using their bodies in real time, in an attempt to introduce new versions of themselves that exist in a digital reality. In doing so, technology acts as a fellow dance partner on stage, allowing them to reveal new freedoms of self expression, and expand our definition of what a “body” can be. Set in the intersection of reality and digital space, this piece engages in the act of redefining the body, challenging our perceptions, and celebrating the process of stepping into our own authenticity as queer people. Blending forms of theatre, dance, and film, GDVD displays this relationship to technology as a tool to depict the process of becoming ourselves, and to subvert and embrace what it means to be perceived.
