Unwoven Between the Disciplines

… Michael K’s crafting and raw introspection commingled with shifting points of view: “What if a dead end isn’t the end, but just a chance to start over again. This time slower….” which arrived as a realization in a poem Michael Frazier wrote for the collaboration, where his insight indwelt the cross-hatch of experiment and research. Through collaboration, improvisation, research, and interviews, materially and metaphysically entangled, Frazier was speaking the greatest secrets of this liminal zone.  Frazier’s poem was interwoven with questions:” What do you desire most in the world? Here, research opened the way for the metaphysical to grow alongside the literal within the hedges and walls of roses in the labyrinth maze. 

I began research for The Body Between Labyrinth and Maze during pre-conceptualization and continued through the pre-production phase. The research identified ways of reading the binds and possibilities of exploring maze and labyrinth structures, which served as the criterion for selecting the artists to be featured in the project. Michael K—I encountered his work at Pilsen Made and was struck by the intricacy and generosity of his craftsmanship. It felt clear that his work could hold this project up, both structurally and ethically. He is the salt of the Earth! Milenka A. — I experienced their movement and was moved by their sensitivity; they bring a depth of attention that allows uncertainty to remain open and alive. Michael F—so indispensable to this project —I heard his work at a Poetry Foundation reading and was struck by his rhythmic precision and the visceral quality of his language. When we formed as a group, the three artists and Crum and I began with a question: What is a maze, and what is a labyrinth? In examining these structures—both materially and metaphorically—we found them linked by the confusion they generate, and by the deep belief that comes into play when we move within them. Often, it became difficult to tell the maze apart from the labyrinth. And it was precisely in that indistinction that this project took shape: in the space of the body between the labyrinth and the maze. 

In that space, confusion, alongside feelings of conviction and crisis, became powerful metaphors across dance, poetry, and woodwork—for how we move through relationships, debt, addiction, mystery, and trust. For experimentation, this project began as a wager: by bringing these disciplines together, we might not resolve these experiences, but inhabit them more fully. Curiosity led, a reciprocal process: Milenka Aurelio’s movement and Michael Frazier’s poetry called forth Michael Kendall’s construction of a wooden labyrinth. And then that structure spoke back—reshaping movement, redirecting language, and asking each artist to navigate something they did not fully control. Following an experimental ethic, the collaboration solicited a DJ, Viper, to provide a beat to underscore the poem “Addiction is a Maze,” and Milenka improvised until finding a movement that reflected the shake and frenzy, the desperation and trust that emerged, translating the poem into movement. 

Perhaps the simultaneity of the traits of a maze conjured also the question which wreathed the center of our theme, “What does the body represent in your work? A space of creation? A harvest of potential? A wound? A way of communicating?” Milenka Aurelio beautifully articulated how the body is a site of “memories, trauma,  joy, history, and potential— all at once” in their contemporary dance practice.  They further articulate how the body is the very medium from which they create and how they show— or is the presentational form of what they have created. What emerged was not resolution, but attention to how our bodies register structure, and how we move within what both guides and confounds us. And perhaps most importantly, to the idea that these entanglements can be shared—that we are not alone inside them. This is where the work at times exceeded the bounds of the interdisciplinary—it became relational. A shared site of investment, where what we often experience in isolation could be held in a sense of solidarity.