The Opening: Ritual for Safe Travels Through the Portal (Trailer)
                                             Paul Dresher Ensemble Rehearsal Studio | March 2020
​                             *Full version to be presented as live mediated performances upon specific request*
Performance opens up a 4th temporal space - between past and present, present and future - creating a moment of potentiality during a time when options and choice seem like an impossibility. The Opening: Ritual for Safe Travels Through the Portal was filmed just two days before shelter-in-place was implemented in San Francisco. It documents the last “live” collaborative performance I participated in, the last dance party I attended, and the first time I seriously considered what it would be like to relinquish all that I take for granted as a live performer: audience, energetic intimacy, breath without barriers, and “liveness” itself. This creative exchange was a vehicle through which to deeply consider the function of performance within the context of socio-political, environmental, and spiritual upheaval. It's a study on mediated performance; micro-choreographies and queer intimacy; the burden of performing "liveness"; and their combined potential to simultaneously illuminate and reconfigure the exchange that occurs between temporalities, “audiences”/“performers”, and space/place. 

Given the new set of parameters that live performers must contend with in the age of COVID-19, what opportunities does the medium of technologically mediated performance present for performers and audiences alike? What would it look like to experience site-specific performances that are decentralized and rhizomatic in presentation?

(Left Image)
​Still image from The Opening: Ritual for Safe Travels Through the Portal (2020)
Paul Dresher Ensemble Rehearsal Studio | Oakland, CA
​Footage shot by Walker Olesen