Lamentation: Dancing the Archive
Lamentation: Dancing the Archive allows audiences to manipulate a volumetric (3D) video of Martha Graham’s iconic 1930 work, Lamentation, with their own gestures and movement. Lamentation is an early modernist distillation of grief through the body. Graham’s display of raw angst, radical for its time, is timely today amidst various catastrophes that parallel those that Graham responded to. The user engages with this work through embodied channels, fostering closeness to this work and building bridges from past to present.
“A lot of the work in this exhibition is about coming to terms with what this new intelligence is and looks like, and marveling at the stage it’s in now,” Fisher said. “It prompts us to look at our own identities and temporal, corporeal existences in a different light… We’re creating choreographic structures that don’t just reflect what is possible now but are designed to evolve alongside emergent futures.”
Katherine Helen Fisher, Curator, Dancing the Algorithm
Quoted in The New York Times
Project Collaborators
Conceived by Xin Ying
Co-creators: Katherine Helen Fisher and Alan Winslow
Performances by Xin Ying and Lloyd Knight
Music by Myles Avery
Motion Graphics by Shimmy Boyle
Technical Consulting by Shimmy Boyle and Mingyoung Cheng
Presentations
Future Stages, NYU, August 2024
MeMoSa, Barnard Movement Lab, February 2025
Dancing the Algorithm at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, July 2025
Funding + Support
Google Artists + Machine Intelligence
Barnard Movement Lab
Martha Graham Dance Company
Evercoast
New York University
UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance
Standard Vision/SVstudios Los Angeles
stay informed
Learn about my process & thinking at my substack, system:go, and find out when I have performances and events like this one.
Photography of Jacob’s Pillow installation by Christopher Duggan & Cherylynn Tsushima. Exhibition film by Nel Shelby Productions.
Full film and installation credits here.