A multidisciplinary collaboration between visual artist John Felix Arnold, MacArthur fellow Michelle Dorrance and Byron Tittle of Dorrance Dance tap company, Echoes: From Here featured a 30-minute dance performance that produced a new work of visual art: a 6-by-8-foot “stage” created by Arnold from reclaimed wood, sourced from both the Triangle and New York City.
Through their performance, both dancers explored the materiality, sound, and presence of the wood in transforming the surface. Their movements were captured in the piece through marks made by their taps, evoking and creating a conversation with the history of the tap dance form, situated between the North and the South. In this sense, the project also represents the geographies of its creators’ lives: Arnold and Dorrance are Triangle natives, and Tittle was raised in New York, where all three live and work. The piece now exists as a living document — a transformative moment and reflection on the intersections of art, dance, and the social and physical environments in which we live. This collaboration is part of Arnold’s ongoing Echoes project series.
Echoes is an evolving body of work that visualizes the temporal languages of dancers’ movements through experimental modes of drawing. At the core of these movements, dancers channel their personal narratives with the lineages and histories of their disciplines, remaining in conversation with the materials they move upon and the spaces they move within.
John Felix Arnold, artist and writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y. Photo by Walter Wlodarczyk
