The disorientation project is a long-term artistic project based in movement practice. It comprises multiple components – existing and in process – that continue to iterate: development and documentation of practices for perceptual disorientation; philosophical-poetic writings and scores; collected field notes; audio/video materials; objects, interviews and audience responses; a book or hybrid print-digital archive; a performance/installation; and facilitated public engagement.

In this solo project, I work with scoring structures, multidimensional tasking and perceptual practices that open up lived experiences of disorientation and failure. These themes have emerged in my movement practice and derive from my own history with vertigo, my experiences of geographic and psychosomatic relocation, and my reflections on social and environmental challenges that put existing structures and ways of being and doing into deep question.

We are collectively moving through a period of fundamental disorientation/reorientation (and especially so with the recent global pandemic, major socio-political reckonings and the climate emergency facing us). My work grounds this meta-experience in the phenomenological experiences of the moving-perceiving body. The disorientation project explores embodied experiences of disorientation at the perceptual level as a way to excavate new understandings through somatic practice and catalyze public engagement in the personal/social resonances of these experiences through performance. My intent is to acknowledge these experiences as valuable and insightful, rather than to pass over them in a rush to re-orient and re-stabilize. I practice disorientation in order to invite potential new lines of flight and opportunities for recalibration to emerge. How might experiences of disorientation open ways toward more ethical relations?