“Xgzdiiiiiicdiirrwjfffffffff (pronounced grief)” is a liturgical dance about the neutral irrelevance of human discourse.

“…grief” is a work for the void in the dance mall. In this piece, I use formulaic Instagram videos and text from public forums on dance as source materials in an anti-dramaturgical viewing environment. It’s spacious and non-didactic. It’s a slow meditative dance in a dark studio.

Maggie Cloud and Mickey Mahar perform dances from Britney Spears’ Instagram in extremely slow motion for an hour. A slow formal prayer in unison.

Alongside the dancing we read conversations about dance. We read text from a 90-comment Facebook thread about Pina Bausch’s work, misogyny, structure, boredom, and repetition. In another iteration we read the transcript of a conversation between Steve Paxton and Bill T Jones from a 1983 Movement Research Studies Project. We argue about generosity, postmodernism, mastery, and experimentation. The conversations could have applied to the dance we were doing or to the dances being discussed or to any dance/any thing.