We Are Destroying Ourselves: A Dance Wrecking
This website is a digital archive created for audience members of We Are Destroying Ourselves: A Dance Wrecking. During the wrecking event they can navigate this page to learn more about the piece and it's creation process. During We Are Destroying Ourselves, an invited "wrecker" destroys and remakes a volume from our project My Body as the Topic Coming Around Again.
Welcome to the Wreck
“Dance wrecking,” is a practice of choreographic feedback created by American choreographer Susan Rethorst. In this project we are repurposing it for political aims. Embedded in the invitation to wreck these dances is a call to work collaboratively to disrupt patterns and legacies of colonization and white supremacy in dance.
Since 2020 we (Rebecca Pappas and her collaborators) have been developing My Body as the Topic Coming Around Again, a three-volume dancework that unravels the tangled threads of white womanhood and American modern dance. Centered around Land, (In)Visibility, and Care, these dances traverse dualities of freedom/control; sincerity/satire; tenderness/violence; beauty/monstrosity. In We Are Destroying Ourselves we invite other artists into the room to destroy, remake, undo, and reunderstand these dances.
We created this website so you could understand more about the process, the thinking, and the people behind this project.