overseen/unseen in Territory
Performance, 2015
12 minutes
Nadia Bongo and Lindsay Benedict have been exploring authority in relationships through spatial possessiveness. They created exercises that play with imposing a gaze, using a voice and commanding the body. One of their main questions was "Who is able to tell someone else's story?” The dynamic is between two people but they denied the limitations of dualism and pushed into more complex patterns of exchange. By questioning what is watched, they present their bodies on stage and challenge the desire to look.
Everything in culture is learned, including physical movements like common everyday gestures. For this reason, the dance is performed by untrained bodies, people without a technical dance background, in an effort to see the cultural traces that are carried and performed in bodies and language. They improvise movements to show the impossibility of natural gesture. However, through our intellectual struggle to understand constructed desire, in overseen/unseen in Territory, the body remains a source of pleasure.