The ethos of Emanations of Disfigurement draws from Sullivan’s body archive of living life with a visible facial difference, medical trauma, and resulting disability as well as a childhood preoccupation with death, attending about 30 funerals from 8 - 20. The harsh noise by Efe Yuksel was inspired by Xenakis’s work with algorithmic sound generation, polarities between density and emptiness. Visceral movement further came from Sullivan’s lived experience of CPTSD being triggered during somatic improvisation classes at dance school. Guided meditations laying up looking at florescent lighting sent her back to operating tables, hospital rooms, and experimental treatments in the early 2000s. Flashbacks worsened with regulated group breath to rhythms not suited for disabled bodies, leading to lack of oxygen in the brain for the duration of sessions multiple times a week, for 3 years of dance school. Research for the work is firmly situated within writings by Higgins (An Exemplativist Manifesto 1976) and David Rosenboom’s work on Sounding the Cosmos and Deviant Resonances.

Inspiration for the choreography was also based on two quotes from Chicana Scholar Gloria Anzaldua, Butoh Scholar Stephen and Butoh pioneer Tatsumi Hijikata.

“I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own god out of my entrails.” Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands”

”The first movement is death. The human body can barely be seen, and has always eluded being written about. It is an infinite mystery that creates its own language, lost at the periphery of vision, while simultaneously grating its movements together from raw flesh. When the gestures of the body are torn and fragmented to the extreme, another gesture of the body emerges, interrogative of ecstasy, collapse, and human obliteration….” - Stephen Barber, Hijikata: The Revolt of the Body

“’I would like to have a person, who has already died, die over and over inside my body…I may not know death, but it knows me.’“ - Tatsumi Hijikata

The process drew from various movement genres alongside devised shapes, staging, and spacial relationships with manipulated phrase work derived from practitioners inlcuding MM, Rosana Gamson, Rebecca Bryant, Adrian Look, and Kim Bogaro. Sullivan’s goal was to play between stillness and structures among bodies. This allowed groups of anatomy as scenic design to reshape the space. Looking at depth, this allowed a sense of dessert or wasteland imagery with lowlands in the foreground and mountains in the background. “When I was making it, I was thinking about how joyful it is, even when working with darkness and viscerally, to tire yourself out. That feeling when you’re a little kid and you come home exhausted from a sport or the studio, having moved at your max capacity. I wanted to unlock that in Emanations. Graham said that dancers are the athletes of the gods, my intention was to give dancers who generously lent me their talents the opportunity to show their athleticism. I’m interested in negotiating the line between what you make and where it meets the audience. Art for arts sake versus art as entertainment. It’s important to me that an audience member has bought a ticket or made the effort to come to see your work. Their time is a gift, I always want to respect that.”

In order to bridge the gap between unfamiliar and familiar, Emanations follows a three act structure. “I wanted to situate material that is difficult to consume within a form that humans intuitively know. Humans love a three act, which is why it’s lasted this long. I was also thinking about Walt Disney’s Weenie Method which is a design concept that draws people in. I attempted to sandwich challenging material with something that rests the brain. Choreographic carrots (or weenies) were unison or ensemble, or sonically sparse sections." I find the tension between something the ‘art world’ may find silly or unserious and insisting that it has value. My interest in staging comes from marching bands, memories of watching The Bluecoats 2016 program Downside Up. The brass sections, drill, and giant slides are incredibly camp, but incredibly virtuosic.’ In exploring these tensions, this piece was foundational to laying the groundwork for the Clefted Perspective.