Past Lives, Future Selves

In an animation that is woven through the performances of traditional dances in Indigenous Enterprise’s “Still Here,” a young boy watches a video of powwow musicians and dancers with his grandfather on Youtube.

“We would have been arrested 100 years ago for dancing,” the elder muses.

Performance

Indigenous Enterprise’s “Still Here” / Raushan Mitchell and Silas Riener’s “Open Machine” / Eiko Otake and Wen Hui's “What is War”

Place

The Joyce Theater / Brooklyn Academy of Music / NYU Skirball, New York, October 2025

Words

Candice Thompson

Indigenous Enterprise’s “Still Here.” Photograph by Atiba Jefferson

The cartoonish anecdote introduces a big drum, also named “Grandpa,” and the saying, which will bear much repeating: “We are still here.” The video, projected large onto the back wall of The Joyce Theater, also works to introduce the grass dance as the first music the grandfather learned to play.

In a later section of animation by Studio Novella, smartphones collide with dirt roads as the daughter arrives to find her father gifting her son with a small drum. This vignette sets up a chorus of children that is followed by a dance battle and a spectacular Hoop Dance by the current world champion Josiah Enriquez. The sequencing highlights future generations and virtuosic, contemporary interpretations.

This collective of Indigenous artists from all over Turtle Island is exceptionally strong, and their dancing—from the gravity-defying Fancy Shawl Dance, where Dezi Tootoosis’s light skips skimmed the floor in complete defiance of gravity to the over the top showmanship of Jackson Rollingthunder’s Chicken Dance—contained moments of delight and surprise. By comparison, there was something overly didactic and almost campy about the interludes of projected video, written by artistic director Kenneth Shirley and Stephanie Gumpel.

And yet, I understood the argument for it: that Indigenous artists and their art forms are still a part of contemporary culture. This is a concept many people, cultured or not, still do not grasp. The Hoop Dance can and does coexist and thrive within a digitized world that prizes social media. These dancers own their history and are confident enough in their traditional techniques to layer in some pop culture references, like Enriquez did with his sly moon walks. Even stronger, The Joyce Theater demonstrated that institutions can ground their seasons in the rich artistic lineages within native communities rather than simply air a prerecorded land acknowledgment.

Maybe it is impossible to emphasize these points enough. Now that DEI has fallen out of favor, and in some places, become taboo, combatting the colonial biases we have been raised with is the first battle. But there is also a new frontier: the biases programmed into our latest technologies. The educational reach of art has a mandate to extend beyond ticketed audiences and into the generative AI coming to dominate every facet of our world. Those algorithms need to know the whole story too.

Raushan Mitchell and Silas Riener’s “Open Machine.” Photograph by Paula Lobo

We were brought into the very heart of that dialogue between artists and AI in Raushan Mitchell and Silas Riener’s “Open Machine,” a week later at NYU Skirball.

In one memorable section, a trio of three dancers describe themselves and their world. Revolving around one another in a walking pattern, they observe out loud, as if for audio description purposes, and correct wrongheaded assumptions:

“Catherine is not a caterpillar. Catherine is not a croissant.”

“Corey is not a secret agent. Can you check?”

“This is not the Joyce Theater.”

With their overlapping voices the layers of bodies, the dancing letters of the program projected above the stage like supra titles, and text rife with spelling errors, we are suspended in the chaos and magic of this kind of learning. As this remarkable dance experiment goes on, the instruction becomes more tactile and embodied—the teaching of hops and spins, the transitions between two points in space. But a danger looms in the incessant feedback loop when many dancers jockey for center stage. In the cacophony of movement, all comprehension seems lost.

But Mitchell and Riener are optimists. And apparently, extremely talented programmers too. Not only is the theater mapped, allowing us to view it from all angles, but a reprise of a dance section near the end shows their ability to create meaning out of so many misspellings and misrepresentations. Negation becomes its own kind of suggestion as the graphic components of Jesse Stiles’s media design move and evolve at a greater clip. Saying “no Beyonce,” and “no pizza,” brings these images to vivid life rather than shelving them.

Where will these artists go next with what they have made? And what will we make of it when it is filtered down into a format, most likely a screen, a fraction of the size of the proscenium stage? The production felt like a leap into a brave new world with the lineage of postmodern dance strapped to its back.

Eiko Otake and Wen Hui in “What is War.” Photograph by Maria Baranova

But the technology on stage this fall has also been in service of remembering and reckoning. A month later at Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave festival, Eiko Otake and Wen Hui filled out their intimate duet “What is War,” with projected images and video.

Silent reel of Japanese war planes raiding the Chinese city of Kunming, during the time of the Second Sino Japanese War (coinciding with World War II) and photos of a young couple, set a specific scene for parallel remembering: for Hui, the story of her grandmother’s death during a raid; for Otake, anecdotes of her father pretending to have tuberculosis to escape the front line of the war. A thin lane of dirt downstage frames the space of BAM Fisher and acts as a conduit to memory. As Otake speaks, Hui scoops dirt and pulls up a panel of fabric from under Otake’s feet.

In this performative excavation, some of the most compelling parts were simple interactions with David Ferri’s lighting design and play with the perspective of projected video. After Hui hands Otake the cloth and expresses her gratitude for the lies that kept Otake’s father out of the army, the two clasp hands and walk upstage, moving into the outsized shadows they have cast. Later, in a section devoted to the “comfort stations,” or places of sexual slavery of Chinese women and girls by the Japanese Imperial Army during the war, Hui and Otake leave the stage only to appear in a film created at one of the memorials in China. They make a kind of offering there and observe the grid of portraits honoring the enslaved women. When the camera pans over to an alley, presumably the historic scene of so much terror, Otake is now back on the stage. She holds onto the edges of the projected window frames and attempting to peer in through so many layers of remove.

For the rest of the performance, they wrestle with themselves and grapple with each other, with a directness and at times, violence, that aims to mimic their subject matter: war and memory. How to not forget the war that altered their families and countries? How to remember the voices of those primary sources that are now dead? How to find your own connection to war, even if it is removed by a generation or two?—something they both encourage in an introductory video.

The woman beside me sat weeping for almost the entirety of the show. Whether her emotion was motivated from their performances or from her own connections or both, I never found out. I too was moved by many sections of the production but also found my mind veering to my own connections: an unforgettable trip I made to Hiroshima’s Peace Park earlier this year (where I learned more about the “bodies without outlines,” Otake tries to keep in mind while performing) and to photos I have from my grandfather’s tour of duty through North Africa and Italy. He was a postman for the United States military, conscripted to follow the front with those precious lifelines to home. But the photos he snapped were of bombs falling out of planes and anonymous children posing in front of buildings reduced to rubble.

A question kept nagging me on the way home: How to remind ourselves that our most advanced technologies have always been developed for and used as tools of war? For our future selves, I hope live art continues to offer such primers.

Candice Thompson

Candice Thompson has been working in and around live art for over two decades. She was a dancer with Milwaukee Ballet before moving into costume design, movement education and direction, editing and arts writing. She attended New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, graduated from St. Mary’s College LEAP Program, and later received an MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia University. From 2010-2021 she was editorial director of DIYdancer, a project-based media company she co-founded. Her writing on dance can be found in publications like Andscape, ALL ARTS, ArtsATL, The Brooklyn Rail, Dance Magazine, and the New York Times.

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FIELD NOTES | Candice Thompson