Negotiations | "Dress in Something plain and Dark"
Negotiations is a three-woman performance produced collaboratively with Carly Bates and Raji Ganesan. In it, we perform three solo works exploring identity, culture, race, memory, and belonging through an intersectional feminist framework: "Dress in something plain and dark," by Allyson Yoder, investigates religious heritage, "French Vanilla," by Carly Bates, unpacks biracial identity, and "Bhairavi," by Raji Ganesan, poses questions about belonging and disbelonging in diaspora communities:
In Negotiations, three women perform their stories. Using body, voice, and narrative, we—Allyson Yoder, Carly Bates, and Raji Ganesan—wrestle with questions of identity, heritage, and disbelonging. With you, the audience, we resist, remember, and reconstruct what it means to occupy our bodies.
This collective work, and the individual compositions contained within it, are the product of three women working collaboratively and intentionally from an intersectional and feminist lens. It is from this positionality that we love and support each other's bodies, stories, and spirits. -Program notes, Negotiations.
Negotiations was performed March 19th & 20th, 2016 in the Empty Space Theatre, ASU Performing and Media Arts, Tempe, AZ.
“Dress in Something Plain and Dark" is a solo performance that explores my own relationship to Mennonite religious and cultural identity as a white woman, a feminist, a dancer, a daughter and granddaughter. It involves a square of black fabric, storytelling, movement, Biblical texts, audio clips from interviews with my grandmother and mother, and an interactive workbook for the audience. This work was produced for, and performed in, Negotiations and co-directed by Raji Ganesan and Carly Bates.
"How does it feel to be back here again?"
"How does it feel to be back here again?" is a second branch of "Dress in Something Plain and Dark." Using a piece of black fabric as a symbol for church space, ideology, and tradition, I move through states of reverence and expectation, boredom and indifference, playfulness and curiosity, confinement and restriction, in an ongoing cycle of approach, investigation, abandonment, and return.
Performances
Dance: Inventions and Conventions: Friday, April 15, 6:30 p.m.; Saturday April 16, 7:30 p.m., Sunday, April 17, 2:00 p.m. Galvin Playhouse, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ. Click here for tickets!
Transitions Projects II: Saturday, February 20, 7:30 p.m.; Sunday, February 21, 2:30 p.m. Margaret Gisolo Theatre, Arizona State University
