Open Reduction Internal Fixation (ORIF) [2020-2022]
Image description: Yo-Yo puts weight through her hands and knees on all fours next to a tall green houseplant that curves like a spine in a video projection on the white wall of a large dance studio with glossy wooden floors while Ella and Kiera ride stationary bikes on the wooden floor of the studio. The shadows of Ella, Kiera, and the bikes dance behind them on the wall. Photo credit: Lance J. Reha
Image description: Ella stands in the foreground and pulls both ends of a red TheraBand wrapped around a white column with black padding fastened around it while Kiera plays accordion and sings in a chair in the background. The red TheraBand cuts diagonally across Kiera’s body. Photo credit: Lance J. Reha
Open Reduction Internal Fixation (ORIF) is an ongoing archival process that oscillates between aestheticizing and de-aestheticizing daily maintenance movements. Tuning into mobility impairment, chronic illness, and physical therapy as choreographic resources, this practice began as an attempted collaboration between a stainless-steel plate, seven screws, and a distal radius from the time of their surgical fixation in April 2019 and has continued beyond the surgical removal of hardware in July 2020.
With attention to the materiality and temporality of disability, ORIF offers porous bones, rubber TheraBand resistance bars, accordion bellows, and strands of homemade pasta as dance partners in scores that stew in the blurriness between internal and external.
Conceived and choreographed by Kiera Bono. Collaborators: Laura Harris Farrell, Alexander Enzo Hope, Simone Johnson, Yo-Yo Lin, Julia Lucrecia Taveras, and Ella Dawn W-S. Live captioning by Cory Dostie and ASL interpretation by Candace Davider. [Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art]
[A portion of this process is called 51 visits/The Art-Wrist Is Present and will involve 51 one-on-one visits lasting about 30 minutes each, either via Zoom, over the phone, or in-person at Snug Harbor (all visitors to Snug Harbor must provide proof of full vaccination against COVID-19, and we can discuss whether we’d like to be outside on the grounds or inside the cottage with KN95 masks, etc.). These visits can take a variety of forms based on what we both need at that time but can include: physical therapy movements and/or daily care practices, cooking and/or eating a meal together either in-person or over Zoom, singing and playing accordion, moving through a score together, sitting and talking, etc. If ~active participation~ makes you uncomfortable or you’re too drained to engage in a collaborative capacity, you are welcome to just be there with me as I go about my own daily physical therapy exercises, meal preparation, tea-making, accordion playing, dance-making, and so on.]
open reduction internal fixation, or a series of barrel rolls for falco lombardi [2019]
Image description: a screenshot of a video of open reduction internal fixation, or a series of barrel rolls for falco lombardi (a collaborative performance with Laura Harris Farrell at The Whole Shebang in Philadelphia, PA): Kiera and Laura stand on their right legs and extend their left legs behind themselves with arms extended diagonally overhead and share weight with one another in a balance in front of a projected video of Kiera’s physical therapist skydiving.
Image description: Kiera and Laura both tilt over their left legs with their right hands lightly touching the wooden floor of a dance studio and their left legs raised behind themselves in front of a projected video of Kiera’s physical therapist skydiving. Kiera grabs Laura’s ankle above their head, and Laura raises their left arm toward the ceiling/sky.
open reduction internal fixation, or a series of barrel rolls for falco lombardi was an interdisciplinary performance/coming-out party for Kiera Bono's newly acquired stainless steel wrist on the final night of their Open Space Residency with Laura Harris Farrell at The Whole Shebang in Philly in July 2019.
[Laura and I are archiving flare-ups and remissions. We are archiving choreographies of physical therapy and “rehabilitation.” We are “reveal[ing] tensions within the cyborg body,” as Margaret M. Quinlan and Benjamin R. Bates would call it. We are moving through trauma by moving through trauma.]