The Alice Gallery is a former brothel in Duwamish territory. In Seattle, WA, sex work was an integral part of the early economy and workers often listed their occupation as “seamstress.” “Bodywarp: Seamstress” honors these sisters of the cloth through a site-specific performance of “Bodywarp” at the Alice Gallery, located in Seattle’s Hamilton building—a former brothel in the Georgetown neighborhood, an early red light district.

“Bodywarp” explores weaving as performance and calls for a unique receptivity to tensions in political and emotional spaces. The work investigates looms as frames through which I, as the weaver, become the warp and am held under tension, as I perform a series of site-specific interventions using my body. Like the accumulation of memory in cloth, in “Bodywarp,” looms and other tools of the weaver’s craft become organs of memory, pulling my body into an intimate choreography involving maker, tool, and the narrative of a place.