Float Dance Project

2013
Float On, Portland, OR
curation / film / social practice

Float Dance was a curatorial and dance/film project born from an experiment in sensory deprivation, movement, and emergence. In collaboration with Float On, a sensory deprivation tank center in Portland, OR, seven dancers each committed to six 3-hour solo sessions inside a sensory deprivation float tank.

Floating in complete darkness and silence, the dancers explored what arises when identity, environment, and external distraction are stripped away. From these sessions, each artist crafted a solo movement score — a distilled expression of what surfaced in the void — and then collaborated with a filmmaker to translate that score into a short dance film.

The resulting seven films form a many-voiced study of emergence. Some are meditative and intimate, others wild or surreal, each carrying the resonance of its dancer’s private encounter with the void. Together they map a shared question: what dances out of our innermost realms when all else falls away?

Float Dance Project was an experiment in gesturing toward the ineffable, with movement always in relation to something both deep within and far beyond the personal body.

Featured dancers/filmmakers:

  • Takahiro Yamamoto / Seth Nehil
    Tere Mathern / Mark Levine
    Kaj-Anne Pepper (aka Pepper Pepper) / Mark Levine
    Estelle Olivaras / Mark Levine
    Kirsten Webb / Sophia Wright Emigh
    Wren LaFeet / filmmaker unknown
    Sophia Wright Emigh / self-directed

  • Credits:
    Curator/producer: Sophia Wright Emigh
    Filmmakers: Seth Nehil, Mark Levine, Sophia Wright Emigh
    Dancers / Performers: Estelle Olivaras, Kaj-anne Pepper, Kirsten Webb, Sophia Wright Emigh, Takahiro Yamamoto, Tere Mathern, Wren LaFeet
    Sound / Music: Jesse Mejia, Olivia Tremor Control, Sophia Wright Emigh
    Locations: Various sites across Oregon
    Completion: 2013

    Thanks to the supportive staff at Float On

  • Sophia’s float dance blog

“We are born from the void with nothing but our bodies in tow. Everything else – names, preferences, identities, occupations – gloms on later.

In collaboration with Float On, the seven dancers of the Float Dance Project — Estelle, Kaj-anne, Kirsten, Sophia, Taka, Tere and Wren — will jump back into the void and see what emerges, using the only tool we had when we came into the world.

The conditions:

Over the course of May 2013, each dancer will receive six 3-hour solo sessions in a sensory deprivation float tank- a lightproof, soundproof chamber filled with 10 inches of salt-saturated water where you float like a cork (more info here).

With no external stimulation to distract us, what will dance out of our innermost realms? Our job is to explore this question through movement.

At the end of the month, each dancer will have choreographed a solo movement piece that in some way reflects their float experience, and will then work with a videographer to create a short movement film that captures their choreography (for public and online screenings). There are no further parameters.

It’s a simple experiment:

42 floats + 7 dancers + 1 month + the void = ???”

Tags: dance film, curatorial project, improvisation, sensory deprivation, float tank, embodied research, site-specific, collaborative project, experimental process