Chip Kimura
Chip Kimura is transdisciplinary cultural worker raised in Brooklyn, NY, approaching dance, text, and curation as embodied encounters with speculative possibilities for weathering the queer work of pleasure in survival. They have published writing in Heichi Magazine, Weekend, Another Tab of Chrome, No Dancing, and Ginger Magazine; performed and exhibited in NYC, LA, Portland(OR), Berlin, Basel, Oslo; and co-founded Complimenta Inc., an artist-run center in Enfield, NY, that hosted site-specific programs from 2012-2015. Currently an M.A. candidate in Performance Studies at NYU, they received an MFA in New Genres at Hunter College, a B.A. in Sculpture from Bard College, attended LANDING 2.0, and MSA^ Mountain School of Art. Awards include the Agnes Gund Curatorial Fellowship, Kossak Travel Grant, NYSCA Artist Collective Grant, and Beth M. Uffner Scholarship.
Title of Project
‘Dance as a Pedagogy for Weathering Heartbreak’ and/or ‘How to do Things with the Unbearable’
Description of Project
When traces of the unbearable become objects of analysis (in the field of performance) what protocols of study are needed to weather the myriad of heartbreaks that come to bear on the scholarly work of imagining otherwise? To weather heartbreak is to encounter the unbearable without complete annihilation; to press up against the limits of language with the excess of experience; to keep falling for each other as we “clamor for the right to opacity for everyone”(Glissant, 1990). In other words, if love is a radical politic, then weathering heartbreak is elemental to how one might 'remain' and/or 'find a way out' ('Remains Persist', 2022). Dance in its material factuality, and generative possibility, lays a methodological ground for articulating gestures that re-encounter the unbearable: as they appear in the developmental stages - process, practice, and performance - of weathering heartbreak.
This project attempts to destranslate these transitive gestures from the ‘stage’, into pedagogies for weathering heartbreak in speculative classrooms. Research for this project draws from current performances in NYC, and attendant conversations with dancers, choreographers, and witnesses; put in dialogue with theorists of affect and difference whose work queer spatiotemporal orientations of subjectivity, and confront normative mechanisms of domination; including Laurent Berlant, Lee Edelman, Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, Avgi Saketepoulou, Ann Pellegrini, José Esteban Muñoz, Édouard Glissant, and Michel Foucault.
Furthermore, the text in itself is figured by transitive gestures of the writer’s own process, practice, performance of, and participation in collectively, if awkwardly, dancing with the unbearable toward glimmers of the unknowable: improvising modes of knowledge transmission immanent to the unpredictability and non-locality of our mutual entanglement across spacetime.
Areas of Academic Interest
Dance Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Affect Theory & Psychoanalysis, Decolonial Studies