Performance
Direction by Ani Javian
presented in collaboration with Hasmik Tangyan and CoChoLab Armenia
Performance: Mery Bayatyan, Ani Javian, Karen Khachatryan, Mila Harutyunyan, Sona Pogossian, Anoosh Sarkisyan and Hasmik Tangyan
Sound: composed and performed by Aaron Michael Butler,
Oral history with Beatrice Javian (2015) Costumes: Ani Javian and Millie Hiibel
The body is home to lived experience, ancestry and lineage.
As Javian reflects on her mother’s life and her immigrant gramdmother’s survival story,
she is interested in how memory resides in the body, the ways in which trauma is inherited,
and ultimately, movement’s relationship to memory and trauma. ‘the earth is old, we are ancient’ utilizes improvisation, video collage, installation, and sound to excavate these inherited histories, asking, ‘in what ways do we hold ancestral and familial memories, knowledge, and stories in our bodies?” and “In what ways are our bodies, in this time and space, historic?”
This project was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, a Rutgers University’s Byrne Seminar, and a Rutgers University COVID impact on Scholarly Productivity Grant.
NPAK, 2022
