Best Practices: Dance Making Democracy
Rebecca Fitton
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REBECCA FITTON is from many places and peoples. She cultivates community through movement, food, and conversation. Her work in the dance field as an artist-scholar, producer, and advocate centers cultural policy, Asian American communities, and disability justice. She has been an artist-in-residence at Center (MI), The Croft (MI), LEIMAY (NY), EMERGENYC (NY), and received a 2020 New Work Grant from Queens Council on the Arts (NY).
Fitton serves as the Studio Rawls Director for Will Rawls, performs and writes audio description for Adrienne Westwood, and organizes direct action with Structures for Change and Dance Artists’ National Collective. She was a member of Dance/NYC’s Junior Committee from 2018-2020 and in 2021 was part of Dance/USA’s Institute of Leadership Training. She holds a BFA in Dance from Florida State University and is currently pursuing an MA in Performance as Public Practice at the University of Texas at Austin. |
Abstract
Can I dance democracy? I imagine the democratic process as dual attempts of improvised movement and descriptions of the constant, in flux motion. But, the codification of western democracy is instead linear, institutionalized, and routinely oppressive to historically marginalized communities. Best Practices, a ten-minute dance film, is a satirical take on the presence of democracy’s performance in my work as a “dance maker.” The film is a kaleidoscopic layering of improvisational dances, diagrams-turned-notations, audio descriptions, and sound scores pulled together by a machine-processed edit. Through this performance as research methodology, I ask, what can be critiqued or re-imagined by embodying institutional systems and democratic processes?
Can I dance democracy? I imagine the democratic process as dual attempts of improvised movement and descriptions of the constant, in flux motion. But, the codification of western democracy is instead linear, institutionalized, and routinely oppressive to historically marginalized communities. Best Practices, a ten-minute dance film, is a satirical take on the presence of democracy’s performance in my work as a “dance maker.” The film is a kaleidoscopic layering of improvisational dances, diagrams-turned-notations, audio descriptions, and sound scores pulled together by a machine-processed edit. Through this performance as research methodology, I ask, what can be critiqued or re-imagined by embodying institutional systems and democratic processes?
| etudesdec2022fitton.pdf |
