ERMS?

AUGUST 2020 - MARCH 2021


CREDITS:

Rebecca Douglass: Performer/Choreographer/Editor
Tasha Hess-Neustadt: Performer/Choreographer/Assistant Editor
Jake Burgess: Sound Artist
Robert Hall: Cameraman/Special FX
Louis Caspar Schmitt: Animation
Special thanks to Themselves Collective, Venue MOT Unit 18 and Legacy Russell.





Rebecca Douglass and Tasha Hess-Neustadt began working on this project in August 2020, with the impulse to dance together, and to embrace the absurdity of dancing at that time. In the midst of global uncertainty, erms? develops the idea of positioning two bodies as magic 8-balls that can answer the unanswerable. erms? brings to life Rebecca and Tasha’s desires to expand, to absorb and be absorbed, to touch, and to envision ways of moving joyfully.

Since August Rebecca and Tasha have been working on erms? remotely.  As bodies and ideas extended into the ether, the project was deeply influenced by Legacy Russel’s “Glitch Feminism” manifesto. erms? explores the manipulation of gender, character, identity, and story, within and beyond the physical body - dismantling and reimagining the boundaries between the self and the world, scrambling the binary.  

erms? is compiled of footage from a live performance in London in August, and screen recordings on Zoom, intentionally “glitching” the function of the greenscreen to reflect an orange cyborg body on their own skin.  The soundscape, created by Jake Burgess, consists exclusively of digital manipulations of Rebecca and Tasha’s own voices.

__________________