Total is a solo that has more to do with dancing in the third person than speaking in the first.
On the one hand, gestures catch a ride on the body, on the other hand, the body rides the gestures. Temporal drag, kicking up dust, making a smokescreen. The closer the dance gets to the body, the further the body gets out of view.
On the one hand, it waves to you.
On the other hand, you look back.
On the other, the hand is another.
Total is a solo performance that continues on from a question that was present in the process of another work, Sky Blue Mythic. The question of, how to dance in the third person. In Sky Blue Mythic, I attempted to address this question through a process of inversion, by imagining I was a dance, personing, rather than a person, dancing, and through other technical and literal inversions of the body and the performance space. In Total, I came back to this question to try to understand how the body can speak to things other than itself, how a mode of address first has to define a distance in order to generate proximity, and how – through abstracting the visible source of a gesture – the body becomes entangled in a crisis of attribution, leading to cracks in the notion of selfhood so that other imaginations might sneak through. The category of personhood is not synonymous only with the human—rivers and mountains have been granted legal personhood in order to offer them protection under a system that is highly anthropocentric. In this split between person and human, Total plays with the gestural in order to remake the body and its parts, and hold the other within.
Created and performed by Angela Goh
Performances:
April 6 2025 – The 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia
December 1 2024 – The 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia
November 30 2024 – The 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia
November 22-23 2024 – Leeum Museum of Art, as part of ‘Idea Museum’ and Ob/Scene Festival, Seoul, South Korea
Supported by:
Create NSW, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, ReadyMade Works, Critical Path
Photos by Katie Bennett, QAGOMA Imaging, and Cheolki Hong