Between living bodies and objects

Dance performance

Text courtesy of the Lewis Center for the Arts

Dancers navigate sculptures’ dangerously sharp elements in the performance installation Two Person Operating System Type 2, a collaboration between Lewis Center for the Arts’ Martha Friedman, senior lecturer in visual arts, and Susan Marshall, professor and director of the Program in Dance. Friedman and Marshall worked with industrial objects and materials such as rubber and metal, then choreographed tender, foreboding and meaningful interactions between those materials and the human figures activating them, to probe preconceptions of the material condition of the body and engage viewers to think about the sensory experience of inhabiting a body. The project, which debuted in Princeton’s Lewis Center for the Arts Hurley Gallery in June 2021, is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Photo by Jonathan Sweeney