Is This the Shoe? is a collaborative process/laboratory/project that spanned from February to April 2017, with Cherrie Yu as the facilitator, and Alvin Chan, Brendan McDonald, Rachel Merriman-Goldring, Ellie Moonan, Margaret Perry and Noah Woodruff as the participants. The project was supervised by Joan Gavaler and supported by the William and Mary Dance Department.

Through rehearsing, responding and workshopping, the group generated performance materials from outside sources and also our own collective/individual experiences. In the process of making we discovered our mutual concerns with the body, movements, sociality and interdependency, and we formed relationships within ourselves as we explored these concepts on the performative and the abstract levels. What is the sociality of the body within the regime of power? What does it mean that we are socially interdependent beings when our bodies are constantly charged with/by abilities/disabilities, capacities/incapacities, and norms/deviancies? We understand movements as how bodies are oriented in and travel through space and time, and we engage primarily with duet movements/situations to explore the questions posed above, to (re)enact situations of sociality, and to examine affects, affections, intimacies and conflicts in and of power.

The project was first shown on March 16th and then on April 26th, which were two different performances,  and the documentation on this website all came from the latter showing. In the second performance, we cited materials from outside sources:

Pacer Test

Angel Olsen

Alphonse Daudet’s Sapho, p.19-21

The White Stripes

Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor

Hiroshi Sato




The sceneries/sculptures for both performances were made with guidance from Michael Draeger and Elizabeth Mead from the William & Mary Art Department.