Since launching on the full moon of August 3 with our first “Dear Diary” entry, we have published four Lunar Updates in 2020 to our website, www.handtomouth.wtf. Our process is made up of “Notions,” which we workshopped within the lunar cycle. The website is designed to allow viewership and designed to function as a virtual venue, a platform to share the vulnerability and intimacy of the project’s process and outcomes: new experiments, dramaturgical writings, documentations of dance videos, photographs, and drawings.

The four “Dear Diary” entries in 2020 were: BACKSTAGE on the full moon of September 2. SITE on the full moon of October 1. SUICIDE 01: The Junction, on the full moon of October 31. and SUICIDE 2: DE-SUICIDE. Below is an excerpt from one of the entries.

The symbolic meaning of the phrase “hand to mouth” and its reflection on materialistic hardships sheds light on the distance between one’s mouth and hand, establishing the limits of perspectives one can obtain. Anything beyond these physical and metaphorical categories is considered unrealistic or fantastical. When accessibility becomes the measure of availability, “Hand to Mouth” asks: how does this rehearsed limited engagement with a world of deficiency and self-deprivation restrict our non-materialistic experiences? Can we meditate on our artistic responsibilities and possibilities outside of the pre-existing disciplines, formats, and structures of distribution and consumption of materials and resources? And can our aspirations, motivations, desires, and hopes transcend what is physically and spiritually available to us?

The props, movement, writings, and videos in “Hand to Mouth”—informed by architectural models, collage, and jigsaw puzzles—acknowledge the cutout and its negative shapes as positive architectural economies of consumption and refuse. In this dismembered world, the violent acts of dissecting bodies and environments and the contrasting care of assembly in the collage process serve as the range for the project’s workshops. Can we, as compartmentalized individuals in a fragmented ruined landscape, locate a newly formed incorporated body that has the ability to reverse the limited direction of consumption into a manifesting power of possibilities to interact with, within, and without?