Radio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ at On the Boards

Different histories, artistic/cultural educations, and experiences fuse together to create a new form of dance that you don’t want to miss!

RADIO III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ is both an indigenous futuristic concert and a beautifully uncomfortable dance performance that strives to make visible what has been kept invisible in colonial systems of recognition and aesthetics. Choreographed and performed by Hanako Hoshimi-Caines, Zoë Poluch and Elisa Harkins with music composed by Elisa Harkins, RADIO III questions, challenges, and defies minimalism and postmodern dance’s aesthetic claims of neutrality.

RADIO III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ is an indigenous futuristic concert, a beautiful and uncomfortable dance performance and a perverse triangle of shifting power that seeks to be unfaithful to both minimalism and postmodern dance’s claims to so-called “neutrality”. In this work, we seek to live, layer and situate form in our bodies, as these evoke past, present and future possibilities.

Choreographed and performed by Hanako Hoshimi-Caines, Zoë Poluch and Elisa Harkins, and music composed by Elisa Harkins, Radio III was borne in part from our common interest in minimalism in art and music. We asked: how can we work on the performativity and spatial principles of minimalism while questioning the universalism associated with this aesthetic. We made a dance that haunts the recognizable toolbox of abstraction, form, repetition and pattern by striving to make visible what has been kept invisible in colonial systems of recognition and aesthetics.

In relation to questions of invisibility/visibility, simultaneity and pluralization, this work explores ways of displacing and situating western contemporary dance and theory, making it an “as well” and a “next to”. In creating the piece, we did not look for a universal hybrid aesthetic but hoped to create a particular form from our desire to bring our different histories, artistic and cultural educations and experiences together with sensitivity and inquisitiveness.

The intention of Radio III, a larger work that includes Elisa Harkins’ solo Wampum performance, is to create a metaphorical peacekeeping agreement between the performers in the work as well as with people watching the piece, regardless of tribe or race.