I Wield a Tool in Hand.
I come from a long line of farmers and carpenters on both sides of my family, one from rural Northwestern Ohio and the other from rural Southeastern Nigeria, West Africa. I worked in my grandmother's garden in the Midwest with long-handled hoes, rhythmically changing which hand was on top and which hip spiraled to the front as I found the circular flow that broke ground. In Nigeria, I worked in a low crouched position with short-handled hoes, my torso forward with the weight of the instrument hanging from the easy swing in my shoulders, the engine of the blade emanating from my hips rocking, and my feet sliding 1-2, 1-2. I would later revisit those stances and efficiencies of technique in my ballet classes and in my West African dance classes, respectively.
As a choreographer and dancer, I have studied and used the dances of many different cultures in my work. And I have been curious about the purposes, the effect of dancing, and its relationship to other things. The link between the movements that our ancestors practiced with the tools they used to survive and the types of movements that they used to craft their dances is clear. Yet, what about us today? As the evolution of digital technology begins to leap and bound, I believe reclaiming our hereditary relationship between body, mind, and tool is especially important. Our brain, so wired by and to movement, is still genetically oriented toward actions with tools that engage our bodies in very physical ways, beyond our thumbs interacting with a tiny computer screen. Project Tool offers a somatic excavation of this concept by isolating and identifying the actions, techniques, aesthetics, and capacities of the body involved in the act of building and working with tools. It also offers my collaborators and me, in this time of insecurity regarding the future of the arts, an opportunity to claim our right to be artists who contribute to society through our work. Project Tool offers us the opportunity to stand strong in the embodied fact that we can literally build our own platforms.
Project Tool’s creative process will yield the following products:
Onye Ozuzu
As a choreographer and dancer, I have studied and used the dances of many different cultures in my work. And I have been curious about the purposes, the effect of dancing, and its relationship to other things. The link between the movements that our ancestors practiced with the tools they used to survive and the types of movements that they used to craft their dances is clear. Yet, what about us today? As the evolution of digital technology begins to leap and bound, I believe reclaiming our hereditary relationship between body, mind, and tool is especially important. Our brain, so wired by and to movement, is still genetically oriented toward actions with tools that engage our bodies in very physical ways, beyond our thumbs interacting with a tiny computer screen. Project Tool offers a somatic excavation of this concept by isolating and identifying the actions, techniques, aesthetics, and capacities of the body involved in the act of building and working with tools. It also offers my collaborators and me, in this time of insecurity regarding the future of the arts, an opportunity to claim our right to be artists who contribute to society through our work. Project Tool offers us the opportunity to stand strong in the embodied fact that we can literally build our own platforms.
Project Tool’s creative process will yield the following products:
- The performance: I and other dancer/builder/performers will engage in the act of building. The building will become stylized over time through improvisation, projected images, original sound compositions, spoken dialogue, and text. The performance will begin with the “building of” these floors and evolve over the course of 6-9 months into “performing on” these floors. From time to time, we will host guest dancers and companies. Their participation will include an invitation to have their names carved into the bottom of the floors, granting them access to borrow the floors freely in the future.
- The floors: a collection of modular sprung wood dance floors, archived at the Rebuild Foundation in Hyde Park, will be available to be borrowed for use by dancers and choreographers throughout the city of Chicago.
Onye Ozuzu