Author: norarainethompson

  • Responding to Niall Jones at Danspace Project

    A little life
    Women’s work
    Complaints?

    Splat splat
    Polaroids go

    Make the show run the show while making the show
    Plot the performance in the performance

    A funeral (how to embalm) (ass out)
    A wedding (falling clouds, wrapped up clouds for the man in white) (a waltz with a piano)
    And hell
    Where we dance

    And air wind blown up blown out
    A flying screaming tube of dance

  • Responding to Ariel Lembeck at Kestrels

    Leaky vessels
    Pouring myself into leaky vessels
    I find out if they can hold it, carry it, keep me off the ground where laughing and crying and leaking might happen
    It being me
    It being this buzzing between us
    I ask, no, request, you to see my passion
    I’ll hold it flat for you so you can see it well
    Hold it clear in my fists and mouth and eyes
    Clear without smile
    Did you see?
    Fine, I’ll show you how loud a little emptiness can be
    Turning away I’ll push it against walls, topple it, rage in public private
    then leak until I’m gone

  • Responding to Eiko Otake and Margaret Leng Tan at Greenwood Cemetery

    A door opens on the big stone
    The one big enough to be a tomb stone

    Why do we mark tombs, death places, with stones?
    Why wet a rock, to make it shine?
    Why let its dust enter our lungs?
    Perhaps we’re envious of their timeline, so much longer to become, decay, undo themselves
    Between two friends, someone has to go first, become first, decay first, undo first
    It won’t be the rock

  • Responding to Ashley R.T. Yergens at New York Live Arts

    Daddy dis hard
    What if the embryo can talk
    And he’s a drag queen and he’s a performer
    What if sperm has been doing competition dance for eight years
    What if the balloon delivery guy is really good at cheerleading
    What if all trolls are also your therapist and your therapist is trolling you and she’s hot and authoritative

  • Responding to Pep Talk (Marin Day and Maddie Hopfield) at Kestrels

    Friends in the blue
    Tracing where they’ve been
    what they cut out
    what they took from each other

    When it hurt
    When it hit
    When it sweat with good
    When the sweat laughed

    Sleeping side by side
    Early or late going and running
    Dreaming side by side
    Running a late dream
    Only you could keep up

  • Danspace Project Journal: there were always more than one: reflecting on Andros Zins-Browne’s “duel H”

    I write in response to Andros Zins-Browne’s new work, from the position of a dance artist, former staff member of Danspace Project, and PhD student in Performance Studies. In this reflection, I draw from my knowledge of St. Mark’s Church, conversations with Zins-Browne, and writing from scholar and poet, Fred Moten, who is an advisor of my academic work. The full text can be read or listened to on Danspace Project’s Journal.

  • Movement Research Performance Journal Issue #58/59: Fragile Fall / A conversation between Nora Raine Thompson and Nacera Belaza

    This conversation follows my inquiries into the impossible and infinite realms of Nacera Belaza’s choreographic process. MRPJ #58/59 can be purchased on Movement Research’s website.

  • Responding to Stacy Grossfield at The Chocolate Factory

    there she is in her hardened shell of whiteness
    of you can do it if you just tried
    of calling it murder
    is she bleeding or leaking?
    dragging around her future, fighting age
    little naked imp plays alone, but with herself as a first friend
    the trio of ballerinas work dutifully, dancing their dance with smiles
    when the blood spurts and the screams start we leave to see the source material
    candice owens and the white youtuber projected into little squares in a cold warehouse where their presence is threatening
    going back in she is in labor now
    moaning and singing and swaying
    imp covers herself in blood
    ballerinas dance without music smiles unfailing
    settled in a smiling pile
    the end is when imp leaves
    but actually
    i can’t really recall how it ended

  • Responding to ligia lewis at CARA

    facts are simply perception and something else that i can’t make out amidst their clapping
    an intractable desire for back space in a room with no back room
    i see you seeing me they say when we lock eyes and i’m glad but i really actually want to say it back and my role as watcher feels calcified as i become extremely perceptive to the micromovemwnts of my face
    i want to speak but they get to speak now
    i can’t take my eyes off of you

    backing up to edges
    allowing for ow ouch i’m stuck
    slammed smashed squished up against
    trying to be lines but the sweat is still there

    baby pink walls smudged with hand prints and leg prints
    can’t move a limb unless moved by another
    contact often begins with a slap
    moving kind of slapdash kind of falling kind of stumbling to get to the edges

  • The Brooklyn Rail: In The Room

    This essay is a meditation on Chloë Engel and Anna Kroll’s collaborative imagination practice, and was first printed as an exhibition catalogue accompanying Anna Kroll’s MFA show at the University of Maryland. It was later published by The Brooklyn Rail in their September 2023 issue. Read a short excerpt below, and the full essay on The Brooklyn Rail’s website.

    In The Room, we enter a realm of impossibility. Ears can catch fire, legs can be swings, and I can be a moth, crying at the funeral of a praying mantis. We build The Room ourselves. In it, impossible things become possible. We announce observations, movements, sensations, and decisions to each other. What is said is possible, plausible, done.

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