Photo by Jason Smith (2026)

 
 

tracing fragments//something shimmers

is a 34-minute, work of choreography for seven dancers that premiered at Space Place Theater in Iowa City, Iowa on April 2nd, 2026.

Structured through the collaging of multiple interwoven sections, the dance engages athletic postmodern dancing, gestural sequences, facial expressivity, theatricality, and sounding to delve into the relationship between the body, dance performance, and the archive.

The choreography reveals three primary foundations for thinking about the body as an archive. First, the dance invokes the unconscious as well as the intentional elicitation of memory to think through how the body carries history and knowledge. Core elements of the work including rhythm, repetition, and iteration are revealed as strategies for re-enacting and enlivening the body as an archive.

tracing fragments//something shimmers invites a nuanced relationship to notions of authenticity and difference in archival structures. Finally, the choreography demonstrates how feminine subjectivity emerges as a structure for thinking through interiority and desire as key components within the body as an archive as well as a defiance of the patriarchal structures within traditional notions of the archive.

Overall, tracing fragments//something shimmers reveals slippery, internal, and imaginative dimensions of the body as an archive and provides a new platform for thinking about traditional archival structures.

“The body archive is an attunement, a hopeful gathering, an act of love against the foreclosures of reason. It is a way of knowing the body-self as a becoming and unbecoming thing, of scrambling time and matter, of turning toward rather than against one-self. And vitally, it is a way of thinking-feeling the body’s unbounded relation to other bodies. ”
— Julietta Singh, No Archive Will Restore You

Choreography by: Lauren Linder in collaboration with the dancers
Performance by: Douglas Baker, Andi Bartlein, Lola Buczkowski, Noah Fox, Addison Magruder, Jason Vernon, and Christina Yu
Original music composed by: Brian Orozco
Lighting by: Lowden Flowers
Costumes by: Lauren Linder and Sean Thomas Boyt
Length: 34:00 minutes