Graduate Alum Elle Hong (MFA in Dance) has a pop-up gallery exhibit opening this weekend, October 9th, in Denver! The exhibit titled “Visceral Vicinities: Altars, Ritual, The In-Between” and curated by Cherish Marquez and Cal Duran, will be hosted at the BRDG Project, 1553 Platte St., starting at 6:00 PM. The gallery is “an exploration into the power of altars, performance, and visual representation and their relationships to the metaphysics of life and death.” At 8:00 PM, Elle will be performing a piece with their partner and collaborator, Cipriano Ortega, titled “Sitting/With”.
“Sitting/With is a dance with death. Two dancers and two chairs ruminate on culturally-specific death rituals, the stoicism that accompanies news of forthcoming death/a death that has already occurred, and forms of care that are birthed through the trauma of recognizing one’s mortality. Space and silence are not treated as empty, but instead, filled with the presence of memories, phantasmal visitors, tensions, and things we want to say but never will. The dancers embody these ideas through crafting a ritual of healing and reckoning.
Sitting/With is a coping strategy for recognizing that death forges on in the psychic realms of the living—that we are simultaneously possessed and dispossessed by recognizing what we lose, and furthermore, what we gain.”
The exhibit runs through November 1st. Masks are required for attendance.