Levi Gonzalez is a dance artist and advocate originally from California who lived and worked in New York City for 20 years, before landing at his current full-time faculty position at Bennington College in 2020. Through his work, he has consistently engaged in research and inquiries around the sensorium, artistic process, concepts of normativity, and international investigations of the body and its impact across cultures. He collaborates regularly with luciana achugar, and has performed with Donna Uchizono, John Jasperse, Juliette Mapp, ChameckiLerner, Daria Faïn, and Michael Laub’s Remote Control Productions, among others. He was a founding editor of Critical Correspondence, an online publication of Movement Research. From 2012 -2016 he served as Director of Artist Programs for Movement Research. His current work involves subtly subverting the constructs of performance by making porous the boundaries between audience and performer, challenging the traditional architecture of the theater, and highlighting the logic of bodies as the primary means of organizing information and experience.
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artist statement
I am a 48 year old queer cis-male Chicanx dance artist and movement-based performance maker examining the porous relationship between audience and performer through a queer corporeal logic. I approach performance as a field in which performers and audience share physical and imaginative space, highlighting the multiplicity of sensory engagement possibilities in that exchange, with a particular interest in how disability studies and queer theory can expand our understanding of normative corporeality, bodily presentation, sexuality, identity and desire. I also seek to challenge the dominance of the visual by incorporating elements of sound, spatialization, kinesthesia and touch. My work frequently employs non-traditional arrangements of audience and performer within the site of the performance space, allowing for a reflexivity of our respective roles and social codes within the cultural contract that constitutes performance. I also employ improvisation and transparent and active decision-making as part of my choreographic structures, inviting the audience to witness the performers navigating the vulnerability and precarity of the unfolding of the performative event in real time.
My current project extends this exploration into how we perceive the aging body and the significance of site within performance work. I employ storytelling, language and direct verbal address as a bridge to invite the audience into the work, dismantling assumptions about the exclusivity of artistic practices, and in particular the assumed inaccessibility of dance. This opens a doorway for both audience and performer to consider not just our collective and individual bodily experience, but also our relationship to history and place, including the often invisibilized roles of nostalgia, historical context, and environment, thus creating the potential for new and emergent relationalities to our own experiential understanding of the multifaceted nature of the performance event. I am currently fascinated by researching the structure and content of fairy tales, and their potential in creating transgressive and queer narratives that resist heteronormative concepts of desire.
Dancing makes me happy and always brings me to an awareness of new possibilities of being in the world. I have a precarious faith that through sharing the experience of dancing and its rigors, pleasures, challenges and confusions, I can instill this happiness and curiosity in others. – LG