Sydney Paluch

With a background in political and critical theory, my research falls at the intersection of digital hapticality, chorographic epistemologies, and sexopolitical ontologies as embodied in the figure of the subaltern political subject. Exploring these notions creates space to interrogate the ways in which epistemologies of fleshiness are endowed on the cyborg, and how embodiments and tech interact. By focusing on the interface between tech and flesh, I hope to discover what animates queer performance in the digital age, and destabilize the hierarchy of sentience which posits humanity at its apogee.

Title of Project

Gesturing Towards Liberation: Digital Dances of (Re)Distribution

Description of Project

Challenging the visual logics of neo-colonial society, choreographer Stefanie Batten Bland’s (SBB) latest site sympathetic dance cinema installation explores notions of touching through tech. Reminiscent of the “Couple in a Cage” performance art, (1992-1993), the piece “is inspired by colonial exposition parks of Europe, North America, and the Caribbean during the 1810s-1940s” (BAC). Far from anachronistic, the caged figure still shapes our politics of today, as an ontological condition, continuing to cage the western imaginary. Yet unlike the impenetrable iron barred cages which populate this oppressive lineage of intolerable images, SBB’s dancers are contained within enormous, billowing plastic bubbles of PVC. I argue that what the performance enacts, is a redistribution of the sensible, a scrambling of the normative ways of looking at racially marked subjects- caged and caught. This is enabled through an intimacy with the camera and stage materials, recuperating these objects from their imperialist functions through acts of care. This is a substantive ontological shift, that serves as a line of flight. With the dancers’ bodies caught within sterile bubbles, the question of the capture of the spectacle creates a potential moment of emergence for a choreopolitical move towards a postcolonial-and posthuman- sensibility. By challenging that which structures the sensibilities around a caged body through the hyper-visibility of performance, Kolonial scrambles the colonial logics of bodily comportment.

Areas of Academic Interest

Queer theory, posthumanism, dance theory