“   ” is an iterative multimedia work by collaborators Mary Kate Ford and Dan Ortiz Leizman. The work is comprised of three main elements – mark making, movement, and the intra- personal encounter. The proposed work, initiated with a live installation program, will consist of a demonstration of a mural-making process and an interactive installation that combines the mural, vestiges of the mural-making, and a performative video and material archive of previous iterations. Collaborators Ford and Ortiz Leizman ‘transcribe’ movement and mark-making in simultaneous real time. The work is rooted in asemic writing studies; improvisational dance ecologies haunted by lineages of hybrid dance vocabulary; inter-, intra-, multi-, anti- and cross- disciplinarity; and illegibility. The piece will highlight the absence of communicative methods that our bodies have been socialized to rely upon, removing the very things which make such methods operable. Here, what is removed is legible text and audible speech. Movement will replace speech, asemic writing will replace legible script.

Ford and Ortiz Leizman examinequeernavigationalstrategies that exist in the undercurrents of social, cultural, and individual behavior. They combine the classical and contemporary lineages of the fields of dance and visual arts and subsequently push their disciplinary boundaries and study the borderlands where the two meet. By dropping the audience into an illegible space for witnessing two bodies navigate illustrative macerations of language and communication, we hope to continue a dialogue for queer strategies of the application of The Other in somatic relational frameworks.