Generic Specific

Choreography: Emily Gastineau

Performance: Emily Gastineau, Valerie Oliveiro, Anna Marie Shogren, Judith Holo Shuǐ Xiān

Premiere in April 2022

What a mess. The smell of dust, burnt plastic, a slight rot. The room is thick with symbols and sentiment. Everything is rubbing up on everything else. I want this, I need this, this exact thing, it’s irreplaceable, oh god, I’m so embarrassed. Ring! Someone is calling on the banana phone. Hello?! Every prop tells you how to pick it up. Wallet, phone, keys, a match. The generic is something so pervasive that we become unable to see it. A concept is cheap. Break the bookshelf, chew on the splinters, spit it out. How will we know whose garbage to take home? You wrote me a love letter but you said it wasn’t personal. I don’t remember getting a script but I keep talking. Dance means it’s stolen. Dance means it’s right now. Recycling means it will be used. Recycling means it will come back around. We want to start over and start over and start over but there is no getting out.  

Generic Specific is a contemporary dance work that examines affective economies through the lens of the generic and the personal. The piece explores how feelings circulate, how value is produced through proximity, and how normativity is constructed through repetition.

generic (noun): something so pervasive that we become unable to see its specificity. Ex: brand (of cola), a tool (a traffic cone), a dance movement (the step-touch), an expression (a smile), or an idea (the good life). The objects and ideas that saturate a culture until they become standard, ostensibly unmarked, even invisible—as we remain implicated, attached, choreographed by them. 

Support: Red Eye Theater, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Franconia Sculpture Park, Studio 303, The Luminary, MOVO, Fresh Oysters Performance Research