Oct. 1-3, 2020 at 7 p.m.
Oct. 3, 2020 at 3 p.m.

ENGRAM 4 is an experimental dance piece performed for screen, a journey of mirrors and portals that reveal our humanity in the digital age.

ABOUT THE SHOW

The crystal spies on us. If within the four
walls of a bedroom a mirror stares,
I am no longer alone. There is someone there.
In the dawn reflections mutely stage a show.
Jorge Luis Borges (fragment of the poem: Mirrors)

How to hold a stone of many dimensions? Our fingers trace its edges, always finding a new surface. We all maintain, sometimes unknowingly, a continuous practice of search and discovery. As one thing is learned, a new question arises.

ENGRAM 4 is an experimental dance piece for the screen that asks, from the language of the body in relation to multimedia, how to find new portals that direct us towards a shared sense of humanity. From virtual presence we build an existential space through an unfolding world of ideas and sounds, trying to apprehend our own multiplicities and to recognize ourselves as virtually-interacting rhizomatic units, revealing the infinite connections between us. Inhabiting a kind of Escherian landscape at the digital crossroads between mirrors, cameras, geometries and bodies, four human beings search for themselves and for others through unlimited space. Is there a way out?

Directed and designed by choreographer Claudia Lavista, with original music by composer Albert Mathias, technological direction by Raúl Mendoza and performed by  Keanu Brady, Jonathan Alavés, Scotty Hardwig and Diego Alcalá, this project highlights a multinational collaboration of artists from the United States and Mexico beyond the borders.

Find out more here.

Commissioned and produced by Scotty Hardwig and the Virginia Tech School of Performing Arts in partnership with Delfos Danza Contemporanea. Made possible in part by generous grant funding from the Virginia Tech College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences Global Partnerships Grant, the School of Performing Arts Bruce Carver Grant, and additional support from the Institute for Creativity, Arts and Technology (ICAT) at Virginia Tech. In collaboration with Delfos Danza Contemporanea, with the support of the Programa para el Fortalecimiento de las Artes Escénicas-México (FONCA).