Choreography: Silvana Cardell
Dramaturgy: Blanka Zizka
Dancers: Merián Soto, William Robinson, Mackenzie Morris, Muyu Yuan Ruba, Tyler Rivera, Tyra “Crux“ Jones-Blain
Sound Design: Maria Chavez
Large-scale Sculpture: Daniel Cardell assisted by Mariano Schaum, Damian Espinoza & Maximiliano Schaum                                           Prop Sculptures: Paula Meninato                                                                                                                                                                                    Video Projections*: Colin J. Sass                                                                                                                                                                                         *Featuring sounds and video footage of pig residents at Rose Mill Farm-Pig Placement Network (Rescue Organization).                               No animal was harm during this production.                                                                                                                                                                       Lighting Design: Colin J. Sass & Bless Rudisill                                                                                                                                                                   Video and photos: Michelle Smith                                                                                                                                                                                           Stage Manager: Patreshettarlini Adams                                                                                                                                                                             Ground-consulting: Josh McIlvain                                                                                                                                                                        Artists Bios

The Wilma Theater                                                                                                                                                           

Managing Director: Leigh Goldenberg

Artistic Director: Morgan Green

Artistic Director: Lindsay Smiling

Artistic Director: Yury Urnov

Artistic Director Emeritus: Blanka Zizka

House Crew

Technical Director: Benny Henry

Head Electrician: Ben Levan & Isabella Gill-Gomez

Flyman/Deckhand: Michael “Bagman” Battaglia

Audio Engineer: Eddie Smith

Bryn Mawr College Faculty                                                                                               

Director of Dance: Lela Aisha Jones                                                                                

Interim Director and Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance: Tammy Carrasco              

Professor Emerita of Dance: Linda Caruso-Haviland                                                                        

Co-Director and Director Emerita of Dance: Madeline Cantor                         

Performing Arts Series Coordinator: Meredith Finch

Notes on Disposable Bodies by Professor Allan Irving

Artist Francis Bacon wants his paintings to “hit the nervous system.”  Disposable Bodies does exactly that, rendering indifference impossible. The intensity of the work hurts, causes pain and even activates a momentary loss of self.  In the performance there are images of a single eye of a pig holding us human animals in its gaze; this cyclops eye does not reveal so much as it dissolves, does not produce but destroys, does not make but unmakes the anthropocentric world. Fixed discourses are unsettled in the dance work as it strikes at us in images and movement with amazing force shattering our ontological certainties.  As our nervous system is aggravated by what unfolds we become flooded with sensations that tells us about a world that is wounded, mutilated and so often torn in two. What is revealed is the murder, torture and incarceration of suffering bodies of nonhuman animals.

For philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his co-author Felix Guattari philosophy is the creation of concepts, and therefore we should produce concepts that enable rather than foreclose possibilities, including becoming animal. They write, “to become animal is to participate in movement, to stake out a path of escape in all its positivity, to cross a threshold, to reach a continuum of intensities, a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone, in zones of liberated intensities…”  Francis Bacon’s paintings of raw flesh compel us to acknowledge that every person who suffers is a ‘piece of meat’ and that meat is a zone of indiscernibility between human and nonhuman animals. He is deeply affected by the image of the slaughterhouse and the idea that he could be there rather than the nonhuman animals. 

Deleuze and Guattari resist universal concepts, and all regimes of normalcy preferring instead flow, flux, movement and becoming. In all works of art it is vital to make it act, “of inventing vibrations, rotations, whirlings, gravitations, dances or leaps which directly touch the mind.” It is within this frame that Disposable Bodies brings us unambiguously to a realization that most of the encounters human animals have with nonhuman animals are for humans, always by humans and for the advantage of humans.  We are caged in an anthropocentric signifying singular discourse of human knowledge, representation and understanding. The work as it unfolds before us begins to disrupt human animal-centric understandings of subjectivity where the nonhuman animal is the unknowable other calling on us for new ethical becomings that ask us to leave them alone, the leave be principle, where nonhuman animals (with the exception of domesticated animals) are left entirely without human intervention. We ought to cultivate a gracious stepping aside where nonhuman animals are freed from oppressive human regimes: slaughter for food, torture for cosmetic and medical testing and being caged in zoos and circuses, and objectified in nature documentaries. 

“Artists are like philosophers,”  Deleuze and Guattari write, for “what little health they possess is often too fragile, not because of their illnesses or neuroses but because they have seen something in life [both human and nonhuman] that is too much for anyone, too much for themselves…” Disposable Bodies courageously performs this something asking us to imagine and then create a different future. 

Acknowledgments 

This presentation was possible thanks to generous donors and supporters of the arts, David & Linda Glickstein, Jonathan & Judy Stein, RJ Wallner,  Bryn Mawr College Performing Arts Series & Bryn Mawr Dance Department and Wilma Theater. 

Original funding was provided by a 2022 Arts Projects award from the National Endowment for the Arts awarded to Philadelphia Dance Projects and Cardell Dance Theater to support Disposable Bodies.

Cardell Dance Theater is a 2021 NDP Finalist Grant Award recipient. Support was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts with funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to address continued sustainability needs during COVID-19 and in support of Disposable Bodies. 

Disposable Bodies  premier was presented by Philadelphia Dance Projects as a site specific performance at Taller Puertorriqueño in 2022.

Cardell Dance Theater is a Philadelphia Cultural Fund recipient since 2018.

Many thanks to past collaborators and contributions to this project. 

Ama Mat’At Gora (Performer) Hassan Syed (Performer) Olive Prince (Performer) Julia Higdon (Performer) Zachary Svoboda (Dancer) Pedro Silva (Visual Artist) Marien Velez (Lighting) Kai Rapaeleya (Video) Terry Fox and Philadelphia Dance Projects, Nasheli Rodriguez and Carmen Febo San Miguel (Taller Puertorriqueño), Germine Ingram,  Pablo Meninato,  Megan Mazerick & Georgian Court University, Jimmy Raiford (Video producer). Susan Amstrong Magidson (Rose Mill Farms and Pig Place Network).