Research
circlusion
an enveloping dance performance exploring womanhood, power, and vulnerability
circlusion envelopes an audience with two dancers and a mattress in an inflatable dome to explore womanhood, power, vulnerability, and sexuality. It shapes a choreography of resistance from the contortions women have long performed to navigate sexuality defined through the male gaze. What began as a personal investigation has become a communal worldbuilding project that invites audiences to view the world from the perspective of women to reimagine dominant narratives.
circlusion rejects simplistic narratives of disempowerment to offer a complex image of women in relationship to themselves and others. It posits a world built from within, where women reshape, rewrite, and reclaim their own narratives. Rooted in solidarity and collective care, it asks us to examine how we hold ourselves in the world, how we support one another, and how we cultivate pleasure, agency, and power from within.
circlusion is a term by Bini Adamczak and applies as an active verb to the act of pushing something over and around something else. It is the opposite of penetration. Instead of describing sex from the perspective of the penetrating body, usually male, circlusion names the action of the body that surrounds, receives, and includes. circlusion helps speak differently about certain forms of sex. Penetration is the dominant word over the heteronormative imaginary and divisionary label of bodies into active and passive. The word penetration evokes a non-reciprocal or at least unequally distributed action and being penetrated, as in one being “screwed,” is automatically imagined as disempowerment.
Artist Statement
The world is woven with threads that bind women into contorted poses while turning their human bodies into a projection surface for a male-dominated images of pleasure, sex, power, and beauty. circlusion reimagines the adaptive response to this world not as a submission but as an elegant evolutionary strategy. Contorted poses become dance. Flat images give way to flesh and blood. And that world woven of oppressive threads? We made a new one all our own – and the audience is invited to join us there.
Deconstructed Kama Sutra sex positions are woven with self-defense elements to create the movement score. The piece is an artistic answer to the many ways that sex is used as a tool of oppression and violence, including the weaponization of rape in conflicts throughout the world. The movement evokes pleasure, frustration, burden, care, violence, and power.
Movements explore dominance, submission, and pleasure. They embody the multifaceted dynamics of love, rivalry, and empowerment. At times, the duet becomes a trio with the addition of a mattress; a physical manifestation of the burdens women carry and the care they are capable of giving and receiving. The space is a life-raft: a temporary refuge from a chaotic world. A blank slate that invites the audience to imagine new arrangements and possibilities.
Related People
Sara Brown
Associate Professor of Theater Arts
Associate Head, Theater Arts Program