Rebekah Chappell, Course Facilitator
In 2014, we drove from Houston to Big Bend, nine hours and you are still in Texas. We decided to cross The Rio Grande at Boquillas Port of Entry. We were told to purchase our tickets for the “international ferry” at a small convenience store inside the national park. I wasn’t expecting a row boat in knee deep water. We spent half the day in Mexico in a town of 200 people. The next nearest Mexican city is four hours away.
It all seemed so arbitrary to me, the border so fluid. At some places I could have leapt across The Rio Grande, at times it was a dry river bed. We threw rocks across the water into Mexico. As I remember that moment I am struck by my privilege. I could throw rocks across the border without fear of repercussion. Since 2010, U.S. border agents have shot across the border and killed at least six people in alleged rock throwing incidents. While in all of those incidents the rocks were allegedly being thrown at border agents, many of the gatherings shot at contained children and families at play. I am reminded that a border is an agreement. Current discourse has attempted to claim the border as one sided. That our border with Mexico is somehow all about us. That the border is a STOP, a contained area. But a border is permeated in all directions. Air, water, pollution, wind, flows freely and without permission. How can I open myself up and allow the world in? How can I fight my impulse to close myself off, to loudly proclaim that you are all crazy and instead invite dialogue and exchange? I wonder about the boundaries we create between people, an arbitrary us versus them, a make-believe other that somehow validates a need to try and control it all. I wonder if this all stems from a discomfort in difference. Why is it believed that there is safety in agreement? In sameness? I wonder about the walls we put up in our bodies, the places where we hold onto tension, the moments that feel too intimate, where we feel too vulnerable and we pull back, we resit, we shut down, we create a border within ourselves. In this work I am interested in teasing out my confusion, in making sense of my discomfort in the current tensions in the U.S. political climate surrounding nation states, walls, and difference. I am interested in noticing the places in my life where I have built walls, the places that I continue to close off. |
Hayley Ware, Undergraduate Student
When you wrap barbed wire fences around your consciousness what are you letting in?
Sumin Jung, Graduate Student
I claim that value as a choreographer is in discovery. To me this is a continuation of reflection.
As a contemporary artist, I think it is my role to incorporate the present age into my work.
I also say that artists should work on own works with personal values and convictions.
What is my belief? It is the phenomenon of body and movement. It also means the opposite theory.
As a contemporary artist, I think it is my role to incorporate the present age into my work.
I also say that artists should work on own works with personal values and convictions.
What is my belief? It is the phenomenon of body and movement. It also means the opposite theory.