Studies on Carrying: We hold the line, 2026
Live Performance, 70 minutes
Studies on Carrying explores the movements of carrying and being carried through live performance, text, video, and sound installation. The project draws from the artist’s own experience of undergoing ongoing cancer treatment. As a dancer and movement researcher, this experience prompted her to look closely at the choreographies of giving and receiving care, and at movements shaped by dependency and fragility. Each study is an investigation that seeks to reveal the magical within the mundane. Conceived as a series, the project examines different choreographic facets of carrying, archiving movements that often take place within domestic spaces and intimate situations, or that are so subtle and illegible that the labor they perform is easily overlooked in favor of the grand and accelerated gestures that dominate contemporary media. Drawing from crip and feminist discourses, it unfolds in crip time and refuses ableist readings imposed on disabled bodies.
We Hold the Line explores the social choreography among a group of ten people who learn to negotiate the distribution of exhaustion carried by their own bodies and the bodies around them. The study uses techniques of stimming and repetition to build support structures and create honest moments of surrender.
The study is conducted in collaboration with the contemporary dance department students at the Korea National University of Arts.
Photo: Lee Jooyoung