SARA SMITH
"Octomatia" and other excerpts from INT
Bodies In Motion, 2020 at 33 Hawley

Dispatch from Greenfield, MA (occupied Pocomtuc territory) where I live with my partner and our cat:

Gloria Anzaldúa wrote, “All responses to the world take place within our bodies.” I feel this period of uncertainty, loss, and potential change between my shoulder blades, behind my eyeballs, in my gut. The unease floats. I know that it’s also lodged in some places I can’t yet feel.

 My sense of time expands and contracts, and this is having an adverse effect on how well (not well) my brain is processing information. The implications of various conceptions of time are one of my obsessions, so this state is weirdly kind of exciting, even as it’s unsettling. I’m building an improvisational solo called “one second per second” to trick myself into staying interested instead of freaking out.

 My time and body are pre-committed much of the week to a job I am doing from home, and my home—previously a place of rest and art making—is now also my job site. Long days of video meetings have replaced the enlivening relational space of in-person interactions with colleagues and students. We are all anxious. I am fortunately relieved of the burden of financial, food, and/or housing insecurity that so many face. But I am disappointed to note how quickly I reach the limits of my capacity. I try not to grieve the lost time for creative production along with everything else. I believe that daily practices build us, so I ask:

What am I training through this regimen of cyber-sociality? Through my resistance to it?
What practices can I put in place to deliberately counteract what I want to reject?

 For the past two years I have been developing a utopian performance project based on the writing of Gloria Anzaldúa and lessons learned from octopus and bacterial biologies. It's set in a geopolitically borderless future world, in which humans communicate through bacteria and navigate a dynamically interdependent existence with non-human animals, plants, and planetary systems. This means we have to balance our own happiness and health with the conflicting needs of other beings and forces. The present pandemic brings the lessons and questions of this project closer to me. It feels even more urgent to understand how our symbiotic selves make a composite, distributed body, and to imagine positive changes suggested by that orientation. The hardest part is staying with the truth that I’m connected even to those I don’t want to be.
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SARA SMITH is an interdisciplinary choreographer and librarian who creates speculative documentary performances and other works which traverse dance, sound, visual art, and writing. Sara is invested in creative practices that consider the interconnected poetics and politics of embodied research.  www.sarasmithprojects.com

videos/photos - links and credits:

"INT (In Network Time)" excerpt, by Sara Smith. Performer-collaborators: Meredith Bove, Barbie Diewald, Karinne Keithley Syers 
https://vimeo.com/419437446

"INT Future Oral Histories" by Sara Smith
https://vimeo.com/369725381

Image (above): Meredith Bove and Barbie Diewald with bacteria