Mark Bankin
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Disputation Between the Body and the Worms
"Disputation Between the Body and the Worms"
Choreography: Mark Bankin
Devised in Collaboration with the Dancers: Charlotte Aucella, Camille Constanti, Colleen Edwards, Christine West, Cara McManus, Natalia Nikitin, Jeevika Bhat, Chloe Brown, Julia Asher
Lighting Design: Cheyenne Sykes
Installation Design: Amanda Rose Austin, Katarina Marcelja, Devan McCulloch
Choir Director: Karina Camile Parker
Choir: Christina Swanson, Karina Camile Parker, Ciera Cope, Allie Altieri, Sydney Anderson
Video: Octavia Kohner, Makenna Finch
Photo: Alex Gramma Lightreat, Gene Nemeth, Ed Lee
Special Thanks to Westbeth Artists Housing and Cassandra Baim for making this event possible
Psychological Dance Theater blended with surreal body horror in an abandoned, soon-to-be demolished warehouse. Set in a black lake and accompanied by a live choir, this choreography explores themes of memento mori, old medicine, mirrors and the darkness at the end of everything.
Titled after the fifteenth-century medieval debate poem unprecedented in its genre for focusing not on prevailing arguments between knights and scholars, but on a corpse disputing the worms consuming it. The poem portrays extended graphic depictions of the physical processes involved in decomposition. The perspective of the corpse offers a glimpse into the grave: the interior of a cordon sanitaire, whose horrid contents conjure a memento mori and allow for the vital collective processing of the failures and mortality of the body.
