Move with US
Move with US includes multiple people’s experiences in a collaborative group structure, as a way to connect beyond simply ‘seeing’ each other while dancing in video frames on Zoom. This socially engaged dance party re-examines forms of inclusion and nonviolence by creating connections across personal experiences and geographical borders. We define nonviolence as a social action that resists oppression by discovering ways of moving that shift perceptions of (in)visibility, identity, and belonging. We started by warming up our bodies while listening to music, and then we read outloud lines of theoretical discourse about nonviolence that could be understood by thinking through the body. When the event came to a close guests were invited to narrate their vision of a world without violence.
Starting from a rooftop in Tehran, traveling through an ancestral carpet in San Diego, and finally cascading within a live coding platform in Chicago, our research played with the concept of transindividuality and forms of sensing, rather than seeing, personal experience as multiple. Research sessions building toward opening the event to a virtual public were documented as a video artwork.
If we are to exist in a world where every person is able to move without harm or the threat of harm, practicing multiple forms of physical, emotional, verbal, and nonverbal expression is vital. We might understand this practice as nonviolence and also as a form of transindividuality.
Individuals are always in transition so incorporating the concept of transindividuality within the practice of nonviolence sets the conditions where experiencing and responding to multiple experiences, in the broadest sense, is the starting point for enacting inclusive modes of belonging.
Move with US supports people in the process of embodying behaviors that facilitate the constant transition between moving through an idea of singular to an expansive context of being multiple.
The first event was hosted by Zoya Sardashti, Aaron Pellot, and Mari Thiersch with support from the Graduate and Peace & Justice Student Associations at the University of San Diego.