The Oath

Why do we choose to move in unison—to relinquish individuality to collectivity? What harmonies become possible in group movement, and what are its limits? Can difference and distinction persist within bodily sameness?

The Oath traces a fictional and incomplete history of unison movement as the desire to become a single body. Over a nearly 24-minute film, screened on a continuous loop, it captures the power of mass gesture across a spectrum that ranges from the communal to the monstruous. Dressed in identical, unidentifiable white uniforms and staged within Alla Kovgan’s sweeping direction, a large ensemble of dancers perform Annie-B Parson’s precise cycle of poetic and vernacular gestures. Their movements encompass both utopian and dystopian choreographies of community, clan, club, army, congregation, and machine.

In EMPAC’s vaulted concert hall, the film’s abstract, colorful landscape becomes both larger than life and unsettlingly claustrophobic, calling attention to the spatial patterns the group forms within the contained world of the frame. As the dancers move in perpetual unison, individuality flickers, at once starkly visible and dissolving into the group. The Oath stages collective gesture as bond and bind, promise and battle, celebration and intimidation—at once ritual, rehearsal, and dance.