Walking Wounded is a multi-media performance that gives voice to unspeakable experiences of trauma through generative sound and live drawing stemming from dancers’ internal milieu and unique gesture vocabulary. It offers a safe space for healing through kinesthetic engagement and the restoration of interpersonal connection established through touch. Erasing awareness and cultivating denial are often essential to survival. Through music and imagery generated from the inaudible sounds of the dancers’ nervous system, the piece re-composes narrative fragments, re-animating the life force that lies within often blocked or shattered bodies due to painful life experiences. Sonic vibration amplified through sub-woofers and set to Solfeggio frequencies serves to realign damaged attunement systems.
Long Description:
Walking Wounded is a living lab & multi-media performance transforming trauma through real-time drawing and sound generated from dancers’ nervous system. It gives expression to unspeakable personal and collective experiences of trauma through movement, sound and imagery and transforms the unbearable pain and toxic shame lodged in the body through somatic release using bio-adaptive play. The project seeks to restore interpersonal connection non-verbally in a safe environment, foster resilient communities and bring movement into movement building through a four-part co-design process, culminating in a performance. Working with dancers and non-dancers who have experienced difference forms of trauma, I use multi-modal movement workshops to generate a non-linear, constantly evolving shared narrative, and re-pattern both dancers’ and the audiences’ nervous system.
The multi-media performance is generated with the XTH Sense (XS), the world’s first biocreative instrument and next evolution in sensory expression, which my collaborator Marco Donnarumma and I have been developing for the past 3 years. The XS captures mechanical muscle sounds at the onset of muscular contraction, as well as blood flow, body temperature and spatial information. The XS amplifies these sounds, extracts salient features, then maps them to musical and visual parameters. In this case, they will be interfaced via a plugin with a live drawing application developed by Maria Mishurenko & Gordey Chernyy and two Max/MSP custom applications called created by the composer Kevin Patton to explore the spatial and sculptural aspects of sound, as well as thresholds generated through touch between the dancers.
Each dancer will wear two XS sensors. The biophysical and motion data stemming from the XS will then be sent over OpenSoundProtocol (OSC) and mapped real-time to both the live drawing application (either directly or through a midi controller) and the musical and spatial parameters in Max supplemented by Ableton. This will enable the dancers to co-create live drawings through their unique gesture vocabulary in collaboration with the animators, as well as generative musical composition with the composer. I am developing a machine learning to map the gesture vocabulary choreographed by Pauline Jennings (based on movement generated in the workshops) to a library of generative shaders, brushes and images associated with the fragmented narratives that emerge from the workshops. These live drawings will be projection-mapped onto reconfigurable 360 screen moved by the dancers to form a loose narrative. Storied objects (made with custom electronics & 3D prints), which audience members can pick up during the performance, will hold lyrical fragments of memories shared by survivors, that will trigger, creating a polyphony of voices, as dancers and audience members interact with them during the performance, adding a layer of emergence and fragmentation to the experience.
Both of these elements underscore how trauma is not stored as a narrative with an orderly beginning, middle and end, but as flashbacks that contain fragments of experience, isolated images, sounds, and body sensations that initially have not context other than fear and panic. My desire is to create a communal space of ritual where ghosts can be exorcised and healing can take place, non-linguistically.
Funding: Research Foundation – CUNY, $6,500 (for R&D), plus in kind studio space from LEIMAY (currently seeking production funding)
Additional Partners: Veteran Artists Program, Trauma Institute, Movement Strategy Center, Mind Leaps, Free Body Project and the Trauma Stewardship Institute