In an Anthropology seminar called Dance Work, I was assigned to conduct an ethnographic research project related to our learning on laboring bodies and the energy, output, and effects that they produce.

 

After spending a semester activating academic discourse through the body in Dance Work and developing my printmaking practice at the School of Museum of Fine Arts, I was thinking about the process of moving across and between mediums as an act of physical translation. Specifically, I was questioning how we articulate and enact text-based learning through various mediums, especially the body, and what the act of translation reveals about how we actualize our identities?  
 

My multi-part project involved a group of six Jewish students and focused on the notion of labor as it relates to the Jewish notion of avodat halev, the work of the heart and the work of spiritual practice. We started with a brief Torah study followed up by a dance workshop meant to respond to the text.  Through a process of group reflection and artistic response, I examined how laboring bodies and minds, mine included, articulated identity and conceptual understanding through movement and art. I synthesized our artistic reflections into a single lithograph using a pronto plate. 

 

 

Please get in touch if you'd like to see a full copy of the workshop and paper.