Gainesville, Florida
Dance, Cultural Organizing

Space Carcasses is an interdisciplinary performance that juxtaposes, superimposes, and amplifies the relationship between spaces that echo with Afrodiasporic forced migrations. Factor’s Row, Savannah, Georgia, La Rochelle, France, and sites in Northern Nigeria have been the focus of early research. A carcass leaves an imprint of a version of us we are no longer, a “skin,” a container that we have left behind. Like the residue of the body’s presence, the residue of these spaces resonate with their layered meanings. By reunifying these spaces with technology as the facilitator and the body as a bridge, Space Carcasses will record, recontextualize, and re-remember how space, place, history, lineage are linked together. Space Carcasses asserts a “trans+space+time” Africanness, a transnational membership across the Afrodiaspora that finds resonance in a sense of detachment—forced and otherwise—from our shared cultural roots and unmoored attachment to one another in our shared experiences of continuance in spite of that detachment. Space Carcasses harnesses this global, technological moment to facilitate the folding of time and space that has been occurring throughout the Afrodiasporic experience, using technology to digitally inhabit places while referencing back to their embodied, historical narratives.

Onye Ozuzu is a performing artist, choreographer, administrator, educator, and researcher, currently serving as the Dean of the College of the Arts at the University of Florida. She has dedicated much of her work as a dance artist to cultivating space for diverse dance forms to exist in a pluralist relationship to one another. Since 1997, she has been presenting choreographic work nationally and internationally. Recent work includes, Touch My Beloved’s Thought, a collaboration with jazz composer Greg Ward, and Project Tool, supported by the Joyce Foundation, Chicago Dancemakers Forum, and the National Performance Network Creation Fund.