erms? (2020-2021)
a digital performance film
Welcome Old Friend,
You find yourself now suspended in a digitized universe. Confronted with the vast unknown. You are infinite and the future looks orange. You encounter two multi-beings. They welcome you, sweet traveler. The aroma of pluralities caresses your nostrils, promising the limitless.
Rebecca Douglass and Tasha Hess-Neustadt began working on this project in August 2020, invited by ‘Themselves Collective’ to produce a dance work for a live-streamed festival at MOT Unit 18, (an event space and club in New Cross, London). Themselves Collective’ is a multi-disciplinary network of artists and activists based in South East London. This collective has run a series of successful festivals and fringe events in venues around the New Cross, Deptford and Peckham areas. Themselves had been offered the use of MOT during the height of the pandemic in order to make use of the empty building for artistic purposes.
erms? began with the desire to dance together, the absurdity of dancing in the middle of a pandemic and a fascination with the colour orange. In the midst of global uncertainty, erms? develops the idea of positioning two bodies as magic 8-balls that can answer the unanswerable. erms? brings to life Rebecca and Tasha’s desires to expand, to absorb and be absorbed, to touch, and to envision ways of moving joyfully.
Since August, Rebecca and Tasha have been working on erms? remotely. Through research of their original themes, and considering the new long-distance digital collaboration, ‘erms?’ took on a new energy - as bodies and ideas extended into the ether, the project was deeply influenced by Legacy Russel’s “Glitch Feminism” manifesto. erms? explores the manipulation of gender, character, identity, and story, within and beyond the physical body - dismantling and reimagining the boundaries between the self and the world, scrambling the binary both in the physical and the cyber world. erms? develops the cyberspace as a container for and extension of our many selves, and a way to queer the representation of our bodies and identities, and the imagination of a dance practice that could encompass these ideas.
erms? is a digital performance film, compiled of footage from the live performance in London in August 2020, and screen recordings on Zoom, intentionally “glitching” the function of the greenscreen to reflect an orange cyborg body on their own skin. The soundscape of the film, created by Jake Burgess, consists exclusively of digital manipulations of Rebecca and Tasha’s own voices.
“Perhaps, then, as we work towards ghosting the binary body, we also work towards dissolving ourselves, making the boundaries that delineate where we begin and end, and the points where we touch and come into contact with the world, disappear completely. In this, perhaps our factual fragments can be scrambled, rendered unreadable.”
- Legacy Russel, Glitch Feminism
Screenings:
• erms? extravaganza! A Digital Festival, curated by Rebecca Douglass and Tasha Hess-Neustadt April 30 and May 7 2021
• Theater Freiburg 2. INTERNATIONAL SCREENDANCE FESTIVAL May 29 2021
• VideoDanzaBA Argentina selection, November 2021
Rebecca Douglass- Performer/Choreographer/Editor
Tasha Hess-Neustadt- Performer/Choreographer/Assistant Editor
Jake Burgess- Sound Artist
Robert Hall- Cameraman/Special FX
Louis Caspar Schmitt- Animation
Special thanks to Themselves Collective, Venue MOT Unit 18 and Legacy Russell.
