APE@Hawley

We Are Destroying Ourselves: A Dance Wrecking is a dancework for the stage, an open choreographic process, and a bodily conversation about white supremacy and American Modern Dance. It asks, “can destruction be an act of care?” Since 2020 Rebecca Pappas and her collaborators have been developing a three-volume dancework that unravels the tangled threads of white womanhood and American modern dance. These dances traverse dualities of freedom/control; sincerity/satire; tenderness/violence; beauty/monstrosity. We Are Destroying Ourselves is a 2-3 hour event, during which one artist publicly “wrecks” a 20-minute volume of the work. “Dance wrecking” is a practice created by American choreographer Susan Rethorst. The work comes to APE@Hawley in Spring 2024, preceded by stagings in Hartford, as an event that challenges notions of singular authorship and creative ownership embedded in modernist art legacies.