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#DOCUMANCE with Melissa Melpignano

Accompanied the exhibition Sam Reveles: Solastalgia

 

The Rubin Center was delighted to host #documance, a series of three events in which performer and dance scholar Melissa Melpignano engaged the paintings of Sam Reveles: Solastalgia. Melpignano using movement to document the paintings of the exhibition. 

#documance is a hashtag and a practice
#documance mobilizes dance and performance to document visual arts through embodiment
#documance plays with the lively tension between materiality and abstraction, ephemerality and permanence
#documance resists any definitive notions of archive and moves in partnership with the relations interwoven in the art work

 

Melissa Melpignano, PhD, is a performer and dance scholar. She works as an Assistant Professor of Instruction and Director of Dance at UTEP. Her scholarship focuses on dance and choreography in border and conflict areas, and on decolonial narratives in ballet and western concert forms, through her original theorization of "livability." Melpignano started the #documance series in 2021, and is a co-founding member of the collective Somos Agua, within which she is working on ways of mapping and rememorializing the presence of the Rio Grande through performance