Work in Progress: Space Carcasses

Space Carcasses is a new work-in-progress dance performance by Onye Ozuzu that explores how architectures haunt the body and impart their histories to us as physical effects. Throughout their EMPAC residency, Ozuzu and her collaborators will develop a virtual space that blends digital residues of different sites along the historical transatlantic slave trade (from Savannah, Georgia; Reunion Island in France; and Northern Nigeria). Drawing from movement scores and data Ozuzu developed on location, the residency will explore how the work’s “space carcasses” enable the body to extend itself into these complex and emotionally intense environments. Space Carcasses combines its virtual set with audiovisual traces, which were recorded from performers’ dancing bodies as they interfaced with present-day buildings in the research sites. As skin, container, exoskeleton, or mask, Space Carcasses’s layered scenes forge a composite site that can both record and re-contextualize Afrodiasporic relationships to place.

Ozuzu’s Space Carcasses is inspired by Africanist, circular conceptions of time and expands on these traditions to enable connections to a communal self and to ancestors. Ozuzu situates the body as a technology with the power to access different moments across collective experience. Space Carcasses is performed in an architectural corner created within EMPAC’s Studio 1, which also functions as a projection surface. Large-scale video projections will trail and replay live dancer’s movements in real-time, and a sound dancer will be created from EMPAC’s spatialization sound technology.

Work-in-progress events offer a window into the research, development, and production of new works by artists in residence at EMPAC. These free events open up a dialogue between our audiences, artists, and EMPAC staff.