this room is a body

this room is a body

A solo performance ritual by Sean Nguyen-Hilton

August 26th & 27th at 8pm | August 28th at 4pm

Price:

General admission: $25

Student/Artist: $15

Refreshments: Available by donation

Location: 

The Windmill Arts Center 

2823 Church Street

East Point, GA 30344

Know Before You Go to this room is a body:

• The performance will take place in the black box theater at The Windmill Arts Center
• The Windmill Arts Center is an ADA compliant building, for more information about the building please visit https://www.thewindmillatl.com
• There is a small parking lot at The Windmill Arts Center, we prioritize those with ADA accessible needs. If you need an accessible parking spot, and didn’t select the option when you were checking out of the ticket purchase, please contact Christina Massad at Christina@flyonawall.buzz. Additional street parking can be found along Thompson Street, next to The Windmill Arts Center. Please do not park in the surrounding parking lots of other businesses.
• If you have any specific accessibility needs, please contact Christina Massad at Christina@flyonawall.buzz
• The performance is 75 minutes with no intermission
• The majority of the performance contains live and recorded text, as well as music compositions
• The performance does not include any fog, haze, or strobing lights. Standard theatrical lights are used, as well as film projection.
• There is a booth in the lobby of The Windmill Arts Center where you can: 1. Purchase tickets 2. Purchase refreshments via a suggested donation 3. Donate to Fly on a Wall 4. Ask for assistance
• There will be a facilitated conversation with a guest artist and Sean Nguyen-Hilton each night following the performance. The conversation will take place in the white box studio next to the lobby. Audience members are encouraged to stay for the conversation, but have the opportunity to exit after the performance if desired.

Sean Nguyen-Hilton’s this room is a body is a 75 minute solo performance ritual which premiers days before his 40th birthday. Composed of his writing, music composition, and intuitive movement practices, the work weaves together personal narrative with theoretical and philosophical concepts. Nguyen-Hilton explores themes of queerness as it pertains to his current body, his past body as a professional dancer, and his future body that is yet to come. Through this exploration, he holds space for potential and meaning while navigating the ever occurring present moment. 

Artist Statement:

Two years ago, right before COVID gripped the world, I decided I needed to grow my hair out and create a solo. I wasn’t sure why... 

The time and space afforded to me during my homebound period of the pandemic triggered the processing of deep body trauma experienced during my nearly two decade “professional” dance career. During those first months of the pandemic I was writing, making music, discovering a new drawing practice, and swimming through How Do You Make Yourself A Body Without Organs by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I was using Paulo Virno’s 2/3 Virtuosity and Revolution to help me formulate the idea of the death of virtuosity. This had obvious implications to me in regards to the commodification of my body and labor as a professional concert dancer for nearly two decades. They say that dancers have two deaths; one at the end of their careers and one at the end of their life. I was feeling this “first death” in major ways that echoed out through my body and compelled me to make. This gave way to more research around labor, work, and action, as defined by French theorist Hannah Arendt, and how these modes affect bodies in spaces.

I was equating this idea of the death of virtuosity to the zeitgeist of late stage capitalism, to the cracking of colonialism and whiteness, and locating this cracking in me as well.

I was revitalized at imagining new futures for my body, and moving with it as a site of possibility. I desired to make new forms, both in my body and in spaces. I experimented with equating my body to rooms, as a way to broaden my consciousness and challenge my perception. 

I played with recorded text from the aforementioned Body Without Organs, manipulated it in varying ways, and danced with it. I drew bodies with morphing shapes and lines, and used them as improvisational scores to generate movement. I pondered my future body, the one that comes after the death of virtuosity, the body on the horizon of the not-yet-here queerness from Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia. I moved with thought models outlined in A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari, particularly the Rhizome as “an image of thought” and “mode of knowledge.” I operationalized a queer reach in my body, after reading about bodily orientation in Sarah Ahmed’s Queer Phenomonology.

These experiences and practices have now synthesized into a crescendo of expression that has returned, once again, to my body. It is simultaneously a death and a rebirth, a compression and a contraction, and a swim in the vast ocean of in betweenness.

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Workshop Information

this workshop is a body

September 24th - 25th | 10am - 4pm

@ The Windmill Arts Center

Using the writing, sound recording, and intuitive movement practices that built his solo performance, this room is a body, Sean Nguyen-Hilton guides participants through a 2 day workshop focused on the development of the personal narrative of the individual and its place within the multitude. 

The workshop is for any artist who is making work, or wants to make work, in solo dance/performance. It is necessary to have an intermediate understanding of body coordination, functional movement, and spatial awareness to benefit from this experience.

Workshop alone: $100

Workshop and show ticket combo: $110

*This workshop is limited to 12 spots only. Registration secures your spot.