Rebecca Pappas Artist Statement

I generate movement from as many different places as possible. I

make works that are varied in tone and texture in a way that mimics
every day life a concert between the designed and the accidental. I
might give dancers scores to create movement, work with images
drawn from visual art, or media, or create movement metaphors that
speak kinetically to psychic or spiritual states. I make dances like
meaning clouds, filling them up with droplets of movement, image,
sound and text, trusting that they will come together to form
something larger. Creating a dance is like hiking in the dark I have
faith that we will get there but along the way there might be stumbles,
long detours and even forays into beautiful spots that will be evident
later only in their psychic trace.
I am at a juncture between old and new ways of understanding dance
as both process and art object. I remember, in a summer program,
learning the running dance from Jose Limons Psalm and feeling that
there was, embedded in the steps in their rhythm and execution
something uniquely exhilarating. No one needed to act out
exhilaration, or conjure it through lighting; it was there in the dance. I
am interested in dance as conjuring. I am dedicated to the creation of
movement vocabulary, and believe that the right movement can make
us understand somethingnot by indicating what it meansbut simply
by being. This is how movement works in life. I do something not to
convey that I am agitated or excited or pensive. I do what I do and as
humans we can read, in those movements, the feelings that motivate
them.

This intimate link, between gesture and experience is a powerful

engine behind the dances that I make. I remember seeing Doug
Varones Home when I was in college and being so affected by the
realization that a dance neednt contain dancing at all. It was
everyday gesture, abstracted and performed, and it spoke volumes
about the two characters and their relationship to one another. Since
then, highly detailed gesture has been a hallmark of my work. In
Monster, our piece exploring the corporeal legacy of the Holocaust,
there is a section where we turn our bodies into fleeting memorials. We
say aloud the names of people that we have known and conjure them
in our bodies. The specificity is what makes this section beautiful. We
must fill ourselves with memories and allow every eyelash to be fully
taken. Then, just as quickly, we must drain our spirit as we disappear
our loved ones. This is painstaking labor.
Throughout my work there is an abiding interest in the past, and an
engagement with the body as an archive for personal and social
memories. There is a commitment to the exacting, physical labor of
movement creation. There is strange and powerful imagery, as bodies
and objects transform to become multivalent vessels for meaning.
There is always something mildly funny and absurd. There is often
something disturbing or gross. There is a dedication to dances that are
messy and complicated and surprising and beautiful as the people who
created them and the world in which they live.