Elizabeth

A haunted and personal cenotaph to the lost, choreographed for keepers of Isadora Duncan's heritage, this dance is dedicated to my late aunt Elizabeth. Frequently sick from a fragile heart, Elizabeth was a sensitive and shy woman who came alone to the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union. When she was found dead, Elizabeth was poorly documented in a missing person's database and disposed of on Hart Island: a mismanaged, restricted-access, mass grave for the unidentified.
This choreography is an exploration of the frailty and failure of memory, redolent of formaldehyde, with the spine of found autopsy records in a deteriorating library. The process of choreographing mirrored the process of caring for my aunt post-mortem. Breaking into her abandoned, decaying home, I searched for fragments of her life—photos, documents, and objects that could piece together her story. Similarly, the choreographic process involved salvaging movement notation diagrams from an archive that had barely survived a fire, painstakingly restaging these scores in an act of resurrection.
Stylistically, this work is a hybrid of the three fates and Samuel Beckett's Come and Go. The music begins only after the fates conclude their ritual, with the rest of the sequencing unfolding outside of time.