Rehearsing Community: Rafa Esparza’s building: a simulacrum of power
Abstract: The project of this paper is to consider Esparza's engagement with embodied performance as grappling with concepts of memory, culture, and identity, with the principal effect of enacting community. Esparza's performance locates embodied experience at the center of meaning-making and prefigures conditions for communal transformation. My analysis of Esparza's performance in the cultural-historical space of the Bowtie Parcel assesses its effectiveness as an embodied remembrance, methodology of negotiation, and rehearsal of community. This analysis is relevant to the broader field because it presents Esparza's performance practice as a strategy for social transformation. This paper will assess Esparza's performance piece in conversation with theories of embodied memory, queer futurity, and transformation through rehearsal in order to assert its effectiveness in enacting community.Term paper for Dance L29 530: Theories of the Body in Performance, Fall 2022
Professor Joanna Dee Das
Washington University in St. Louis