move thing investigates the movement of toxicities through space and socio-environmental systems. Resisting all forms of purity, the work proposes that we are all constantly, inherently, and unevenly making up each other and all other animate and inanimate beings. If we imagine ourselves as soluble, always dissolving and reconstituting choreographically, could we move through toxicity and be with and/or absorb toxicity and find new / alternative / old / transformative relationships to its states / tendencies / behaviors / effects / violences / shifts? Could we find intelligences within our bodies and abilities to connect more deeply with the mechanisms for survival and support in sites and systems that we are a part of? In this research event, Monson activates choreographic samples as “sites” within the meta site of the playground and invites 9 interlocutors to contaminate, remediate, and reconstitute new potentialities in the dancing. The playground which is located at the intersections of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, a bus depot, and entrance to the Williamsburg Bridge has one of the highest air pollution levels in the city. Through the intelligences of improvisation and embodied knowledge, move thing attempts to begin to dislodge dominant strategies of development and resource extraction that radically harm the most vulnerable among us and to cultivate the creative sensitivities possible in this question of how we move and transform the everlasting presence of toxicities in our collective lives.
Live Dancing Archive Volume I proposes that the body has the possibility of archiving and revisiting multiple scales of experience. Specifically, Monson looks at how experiences of environment and ecological dependencies are registered through physical movement. Live Dancing Archive negotiates and explores what a queer ecology might offer for dancing bodies and rapidly shifting conceptions of place. Furthermore, the piece looks at how Monson’s navigation of her own queer, feminist and animal-like body has shaped relationships to cultural and social phenomena.