Will Rawls: Everlasting Stranger

In Everlasting Stranger, New York-based choreographer and writer Will Rawls (b. 1978, Boston, MA) activates relationships between language, dance, and image through the fragmentary medium of stop-motion animation. In his installation, time and movement slow as a live, automated camera photographs the frame-by-frame actions of four dancers. While the performers occupy the labor of becoming images, visual capture is staged as an obsessive process that is constant yet compromised by the movement it aims to fix. Here, as in previous works, Rawls develops strategies of evasion and engagement within systems that mediate, distort, and abstract the body.

Rawls’s exhibition takes inspiration from the work of Guyanese writer Wilson Harris and his surrealist novel The Infinite Rehearsal (1987). In the book, the constrictive projections of the colonial gaze manifest as a child’s fever dream where ghosts reinterpret time, genealogy, and identity as unstable matter. Harris’s novel serves as a conduit through which Rawls addresses the misrepresentation that haunts all forms of capture, including photography and choreography. Within the temporal delirium that marks existence in quarantine, Rawls animates the life that appears between frames.

DANCERS
Alyza DelPan-Monley
Akoiya Harris
Nia-Amina Minor
Fox Whitney

COSTUME DESIGN
womxn’s rites

INSTALLATION SUPPORT
Jessica Roxann Jones
Katie Miller
Audie Odat
Max Pethe
Aviva Rubin
Eric Zimmerman

VIDEO EFFECTS
Lauryn Siegel

SOUND MIX
Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste

PERFORMANCE MANAGER
Symone Sanz

The artist specially thanks the Onassis AiR Program.