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these that became us
Kylee Smith, MFA Dance candidate
on view at Urban Arts Space, January 18-29, 2022, with a live performance/film screening/panel talk on January 28 at 6:30 pm.
these that became us, an MFA thesis in Dance by Kylee Smith, opens a curated multimedia archival installation for public viewing on January 17, 2022, at OSU’s Urban Arts Space (UAS) Gallery in downtown Columbus, Ohio. The installation culminates with a screening of a dance film and a lecture demonstration of a danced ritual practice on January 28, 2022. This follows the creation of a site-specific[1] danced ritual at charged ancestral sites in Abbeville County, South Carolina, filmed on October 21. Along with collaborators, we visited these sites in order to engage our devised ritual work as well as create a dance film of the ritual on location. In this project, I seek to not only connect to my own ancestors but also encourage those who engage in the work to call upon their ancestors as well. The work spans Ohio and South Carolina as sites that transform public ancestral artifacts into sacred, transformative, and intimate conduits for spiritual shifts and asks how improvisation can be more than abstraction or a tool for making and is a method of deepening into spirituality as a critical piece of ritual art-making. As a curated archival installation, audiences will interact with collected videos, images, and objects arranged in the UAS gallery and will be invited to consider the archives which are part of their own family histories and the templates or rituals by which they might engage with them and connect with their own lineages.
[1] A work that is created for a particular place that is not a traditional performance space such as a theater.
