Performance, Seminar

Breaking Protocols: Desire Lines is presented as the final seminar in the Vera List Center’s As for Protocols series. It brings together the artist duo Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener, with dance artist and audio describer Tess Dworman, architect Jing Liu, and performance curator and scholar Noémie Solomon to examine the notion of “desire lines” and to reflect on the questions: what do you desire from the institutions you’re a part of and that are a part of you? How do you situate desire in relation to the protocols that govern your daily existence?

As the Vera List Center reflects on two years of programming on the theme of protocols, the concept of “desire lines” provides a useful endpoint as well as an opening, as it refers to paths of movement marked over time by erosion. Desire lines are the unplanned routes taken in defiance of prescribed or absent walkways. They arise from the desire to oppose predetermined protocols for moving through the world. Desire lines is also a methodology for making dance developed by Mitchell and Riener over the past several years. Much like the architectural principle on which it relies, in choreographing desire lines each new line that emerges also has the potential to become a prescribed movement, a fixed pathway that itself creates anew the precondition for new lines of flight to emerge. Desire lines is, in other words, a protocol for breaking protocols.

Participants each share a short presentation reflecting on the topic of desire lines, which is followed by a discussion moderated by the seminar’s co-convener Joshua Lubin-Levy (Part-Time Lecturer, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts).

The Vera List Center’s As for Protocol seminar series is a two-year open curriculum. An overview of the online seminars, accompanying resource guides, and video documentation is here. This final seminar is presented in partnership with Danspace Project, where Mitchell and Riener premiere RETROFIT: a new age, from April 28 to 30, 2022, as part of Danspace’s Platform 2022: The Dream of the Audience (Part II). For more information about RETROFIT and to purchase tickets to the performance please visit Danspace’s website.