Barnard Movement Lab Residency – ongoing journal

During the Fall ’25 and Spring ’26 semesters, I am fortunate to be able to work at the Barnard Movement Lab as part of the Student Artist in Residence program. The below is a running journal of my time at the Lab. Where the project is currently at is quite different from where the planning started, as is often the way in the creative process! For most recent updates, scroll to the bottom of the page.

Current Fascinations (November 2025)

Perhaps I’m still in the Halloween spirit – I’m finding myself drawn to art and ideas that embrace a sense of monstrosity (but beautiful, vulnerable, eerie monstrosity). I’m obsessed with curled bodies and stuttered sounds, writhing limbs and keening instruments, and charged stillness. Thinking lots about movement, gesture in connection with sound, and film/projection as magnification of sonic bodies.

Some art and literature that’s been inspiring me recently…

Words: Lauren Elkin’s fantastic book Art Monsters. Elkin explores how feminist artists for decades have confronted the problem of how to tell the truth about their bodies. She looks to the work of many disparate artists, from Julia Margaret Cameron’s photography, to Kara Walker’s silhouettes, to Hannah Wilke’s portraits to Carolee Schneemann’s films, to Eva Hesse’s rope sculptures. This has been a hugely informative and inspirational read, sparking lots of thoughts about beauty, excess, embodiment, extraction, decay, touch, the personal, and political.

Image: I’ve been fascinated by the work of Dora Maar recently, since being introduced to it this past summer by friends while on a road trip in the south of France. Every image I see of hers is so intriguing. Surrealist art has always been something I’m drawn to, and there’s something about Maar’s traversing of media that really appeals to me. I like the fashion/theatre allusions, such as in Model in Swimsuit, 1936 and Untitled (Fashion photograph), c. 1935, and the fragmentation/distortion of the body that is common in much of her work, such as in Untitled (Handshell), 1934 and Sans titre, 1935 below.

Sound: I’m super interested in vocality at the moment, especially fragmented vocality and collage. I love the way that Erin Gee uses hushed nonverbal sounds in her Mouthpieces – there’s an enchanting vulnerability and delicacy to the fragments that I find really striking. I’ve also been enjoying coming back to John Cage’s Roaratorio (as audio only, and with Merce Cunningham’s choreography), which also has a fragmented quality to it, of a very different character, with many complex layers of tape.

Multimedia/Installation: I’ve recently started exploring the work of artist Toni Dove, who uses embodied interfaces as human operated instruments to tell stories. Her work is absolutely incredible, and resonates with the monstrous, more-than-human, otherworldly themes that I’m interested in exploring within my Movement Lab project through an experimental theatre approach. Here’s one example from her body of work:

Previous Work in the Movement Lab

I made a project last semester in the Movement Lab with collaborators Shira Kagan-Shafman and Nathaniel Otley. The clip below is an extract of our ongoing project which explores connections between gesture and sound.

I’m really keen to continue experimenting with projection in the space over the course of my residency at the Movement Lab, especially playing around with many small screens, like at the end of the above extract.

Playing around with ideas (December 2025)

I’m obsessed with the idea of projected sound sources, separated from the body in the space, which whisper, murmur, hiss, soothe, groan, stutter, lament, screech, hum, and so on – in some sort of uncertain communication that swings between complacency and urgency. There’s something about this picture that feels pertinent to existing in our current time, the same way that Florence Welch screaming into a hole in the ground feels so very relatable…

I think that I want to make a work which embraces ideas of fragmentation, interrupted utterance, and the disembodied voice, using audio-video recordings of various vocal sounds, and production techniques which enhance/distort/augment the voice. I’ve made a tiny, very rough audio-video sketch – it’s recorded on my phone, without any video or audio processing, and very roughly chopped together. Just a teensy insight into where my brain is at in this moment.

I really like the idea of having some sort of live improvisation with projected images and electronic sound. Perhaps these sorts of giant mouths could be triggered through a keyboard with some sort of randomization, so that I can be improvising between a keyboard and the recordings in a sort of continuous loop. The project will likely involve many (100+) voice recording snippets so that I can build banks of recordings for randomization of different parameters, to then build a structure around for the longer form piece. This will take a bit of figuring out in Max MSP, which I intend to work on as part of a seminar at the Columbia Computer Music Center next semester. I’m hoping to continue to collaborate with Shira, a wonderful choreographer, so it would also be exciting to explore movement tracking in relation to sound, perhaps having her movement either trigger or augment the sound/video files.

January Update

Shira and I have begun working in the lab, meeting each week for a few hours to chat and experiment in the space. She is also very interested in the voice and communication. She has introduced me to the concept of sonder: the feeling one has on realizing that every other individual one sees has a life as full and real as one’s own, in which they are the central character and others, including oneself, have secondary or insignificant roles. We’re starting to get a picture of what our work might become. Below is a short note I put together for the next meeting of Movement Lab Residents. It’s the Program Note DRAFT 1 – there will be many many changes needed as our project comes to life and we find more clarity on its character, but for now:

This is a work about sonder and encounter. It’s about kaleidoscopic conversations and collaged memory. It’s about how we speak and move with ourselves and with one another. Through an evening length work which invites the audience to participate in a web of creative exchanges, we embrace a series of unanswerable questions on the nature of being: how do we navigate competing or contradictory fragments of ourselves? How might we find resonances between the dispersed parts of ourselves? What does it mean to be present with others unknown? Where in the entanglement might we meet? How do we understand the layers and fragments of our memory? What does it mean to witness?

In terms of creative materials, I’ve made a few more of the disembodied mouth / fragmented text samples. I think our collaboration is moving away from this abstracted sound source idea, and more towards physical gesture. These disembodied mouths might end up becoming another project [a later note, from February: the first video below has wound it’s way into my new piece for the International Contemporary Ensemble, transcribed and reimagined for wailing instrumental ensemble].

Shira and I are really keen to use the various technologies in the lab to craft abstract spaces. I picture walking on a floor of clouds….a giant albatross projected on one wall, alongside a coffee making station, alongside a piano that backs onto a dining table scene, alongside a running river, and so on. More videos are to come of us experimenting with these collaged worlds.

February Update

We’ve been spending lots of time in Movement Lab and are getting a clearer picture of what our work will become. Improvising together (piano and dance) has been a fruitful way of making, sharing each other’s creative energy and imagination and seeing the potentials of our materials. It’s looking like this project will mark my return to piano performance – exciting! (and nerve wracking).

It’s been wonderful to workshop in the Movement Lab, which has allowed us to develop our materials with specific consideration to the audience’s experience in the space, and the tools we have at hand to place-make. Modular furniture, portals crafted with curtaining and projection, chiffon panels which blur the threshold between worlds, spotlight pathways…. lot’s of exciting things to play with!

This week, Shira has been setting her choreography to the opening section – a slowly unfurling scene of wandering piano harmonies, and movement anchored to a singular spot in the space, lulled by ocean waves. We’ve also had lots of fun this week with contact microphones, pottery, and coffee beans, improvising with all sorts of percussive sounds which interact with more abstracted, tumultuous piano rhythms.

We’ve been so immersed in the creative process that I haven’t stopped to take photos – more to show in the next few weeks!