Do Less

The relationship between dance and political struggle is often narrated in contradictory ways. In one story, dance is an expression of freedom, a zone of individual and collective release from the bodily constrictions of oppressive systems, a way to rehearse the world we want to see. In another, dance is a site of disciplinary training and the dancer a virtuosic yet docile automaton. Others figure dance in a third way—as an ambivalent practice through which to confront and negotiate corporeal conscription into regimes of domination. nibia pastrana santiago is an interdisciplinary artist based in San Juan, Puerto Rico, whose work dwells in this third, more ambivalent terrain. pastrana santiago engages with political contexts, institutional architectures, and colonial histories in site-specific “choreographic events” that contest the imperialist regulation of public space. For example, in 2014, she staged a series of “body vandalisms”—disrupting the everyday tourist spectacle of US colonialism in Puerto Rico by taking a series of erotically charged selfies among tourists posing with the monuments of US presidents at Paseo de los Presidentes in Old San Juan. During her performance for the 2019 Whitney Biennial, objetos indispuestos, inauguraciones suspendidas o finales inevitables para un casi-baile (indisposed objects, suspended inaugurations or inevitable endings for an almost dance), she interrogated what constitutes the inside and outside of an American art museum, literally disassembling the museum—taking off wall panels, dismantling sound and light infrastructures—and puncturing the institution’s borders by enacting durational improvisations on the surrounding sidewalks and in nearby parks.

Sometimes pastrana santiago confronts the politics of movement by making dances that refuse to dance. In pieces such as the lazy dancer (2013)—reprinted here—and her participatory workshop taller de nada/workshop on nothing (2015), she turned to rest, stillness, and laziness to reject late capitalist calls for the perpetual motion of hyperproductivity. In Sit-uations (2022), written for this magazine, pastrana santiago offers the reader three experimental exercises for sitting, echoing the leftist avant-garde art collective Situationist International’s call to interrupt the smooth function of capitalist productivity by creating moments of drift or wandering, and transposing it to the horizontal register of idleness. The performance studies scholar Sandra Ruiz writes that anticolonial Puerto Rican performance can be a “means to ride out the inexhaustible constraints of one’s life under limited self-control in a nonstop state of economic and political impotence.” Through her work, pastrana santiago records the exhaustion that arises from these inexhaustible constraints and choreographs a slowdown. Her performances are an invitation to explore what an exodus from compulsory efficiency might look and feel like: Do less, take something apart, fall asleep.

—Ethan Philbrick

Sit-uating In Between

Wherever you are, take a look around and identify heavy objects in the space that are within reach of other such objects (e.g., a desk, sofa, planter, stove, etc.). When you feel an impulse, move toward one of these objects. Lie or stand near it. Recline your head against it. Continue to test how much weight the object can hold.

Once you are comfortable, reach toward another heavy object that is close by and find support. Repeat this step at least one more time—extending another body part toward another nearby object, so that your body has at least three points of contact with three different objects.

In this sit-uation you are occupying the space between things. Just be there. Close your eyes and feel the distance from your head to your hands, from your hands to your feet. Breathe. When you’re done, open your eyes, let your gaze wander. Slowly stand up. Drink water.