Performance: What Seems Motionless, Waits

Was Isadora Duncan in Croton?

Poet Silvina López Medin poses the question in a performance that interweaves local Croton history with poems and projections of photos and other archival materials.

Free and open to all. No registration required. This performance is appropriate for all ages.
 

Details:

Join us for What Seems Motionless, Waits, which draws on López Medin's research in the Duncan collections at the Croton Historical Society and the New York Library for the Performing Arts. She tells the story of Elizabeth Duncan, sister of the key figure of modern dance Isadora Duncan, who ran a dance school in Croton in the 1910s — and weaves in her own family archive, tracing connections between personal and public stories of movement, immigration, and lineage. 

Ultimately, the project asks how to reframe a narrative so that the "ordinary" lives of women pushed off-stage can be moved to the center.

Written by Silvina López Medin
Creative advisor: Vivi Tellas
 

Dance:

The evening will begin with a performance by Gabriella Hiatt, dancing the poem “Karawane” (1916) by Hugo Ball. This dance solo takes as its starting point archival recordings of artists reading “Karawane,” Hugo Ball’s sound poem of 1916. Composed during the First World War, when language had been conscripted into propaganda and rational order had revealed its murderous underside, Ball’s poem sought refuge in jubilant syllables unburdened by signification.

Just as Ball’s sequences of nonsensical syllables slip past meaning, Gabriella Hiatt imagines the movements as phonemes of the body: units that gesture, stammer, and echo, but do not settle into narrative. This piece seeks to reanimate Dada’s vital refusal of order exploring how the body, like the voice, can speak outside the grid of signification.

Bios:

Silvina López Medin was born in Buenos Aires and lives in Croton on Hudson. She has published five books of poetry including La noche de los bueyes (Loewe Foundation International Young Poetry Prize), 62 brazadas (City of Buenos Aires Poetry Prize), and That Salt on the Tongue to Say Mangrove (tr. Jasmine V. Bailey, Carnegie Mellon University Press). Her hybrid poetry book Poem That Never Ends was awarded the Essay Press-University of Washington Bothell Book Contest. She was a finalist for the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize judged by Arthur Sze. Her play Exactamente bajo el sol (staged at Teatro del Pueblo in Buenos Aires) was granted the National Playwriting Third Prize by the Argentine Institute of Theatre. She co-translated Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet into Spanish, and Sergio Chejfec’s The Month of the Flies into English. Her writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Hyperallergic, Poetry Foundation, The Georgia Review, and MoMA/post, among others. She has taught in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa and in the Spanish Creative Writing MFA at NYU. She currently teaches creative writing at Pratt Institute and Columbia University. She is an editor at Ugly Duckling Presse.

Gabriella Hiatt is a New York-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice and PhD researcher at The Global Centre for Advanced Studies (GCAS), where her work explores the intersections of language, the body, and systems of domination. She holds a master's degree in Mental Health Counseling from the City University of New York and in Visual Arts Administration from New York University. Her clinical training included fellowships at the Training Institute for Mental Health as well as Blanton-Peale Institute and Counseling Center. Gabriella brings a multidisciplinary perspective shaped by her background in the arts as a dancer and curator.

This event is funded in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.