what’s happening with Liz

Liz Weinstein is currently working on her Oberlin capstone project, a work that is built on creations of ritual. The work has been incubating for a number of years, and is particularly influenced by Liz’s experience of working closely with traditional midwives in Brazil for several months in 2011, and the very specific and central role of ritual in that context. The project has brought up a number of difficult and interesting questions which have been circulating in the dialogue among In Nooners. For instance, Liz’s process of creating scores for the ritualization of desires and then moving them through public spaces brings up the question of how to translate process into performance while maintaining the sacred element in the former. This is of course an old question in dance, but it becomes of heightened importance in Liz’s work, which supersedes dance as a movement practice and instead plunges into the murkier water of dance as a spiritual practice. Is performance a pure method of communication? Is the piece simply the sharing of process? One method which Liz has come up with to tackle these questions is the concept of artifacts–writing, movement ideas, documentation–to bring the stuff of rehearsals into the public domain, and further, to encourage observers to become participants. We are all eagerly awaiting to see how all this will play out in the coming months.