If surveillance features centrally in the Republic’s training program, it is recast as an embodied personal project of retuning attention and awareness, rather than as a positivistic tool of disciplinary control. Yet Kosmas does not easily do away with this contradiction; her script’s insistence on tracking and assessing the continuously renewed present, occasionally bracketing it even, flirts with the groundlessness of amnesia, its relinquishing of history to oblivion.
Press
“This marvelous space dedicated to dance and performance in Long Island City, Queens, has just purchased a permanent facility in the neighborhood, but for the time being its forward-thinking presentation will continue at its current home.” —Gia Kourlas, New York Times
Press & Reviews
A body is a mass of stories, each body unique in its collection. But that emergent individuality continuously circles back into the multiplicity of its sources. So, Valencia gives her all--or, at least, a fair representation of what all might be. And then she leads an exercise that draws the audience into this multiplicity as well. Now you, too--all of you--have joined her ensemble, joined with her voice, become her history and her future.
Whether rhythmically rearranging items or jerkily ambulating, Ms. Valencia moves with a vivid efficiency: solid, assured. Her dancing seems almost as tangible as the objects around her, as if it, too, could be bundled up and carried.
It’s not always clear how the work’s multifarious images connect, or if they’re meant to. Yet Ms. Rosenblit’s own words seem wise here: “Being lost is a valid location.” When it’s over, the room strewn with green debris, there is a wholeness in the mess.
Before the messy mound of fabric scraps, chairs, step stools, electric cords and other discards at center space gets picked through for eccentric props; before festively-colored lights blink on and draw attentions to unexpected places; before dancers, without a shred of self-consciousness. display more and more bare flesh and sexual inclinations, there is sound.
