In this expanded lecture involving live demonstration, archival video, and guided exercises, choreographers Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener explore the improvisational practices and provisional methods of archiving that underlie their unfolding and iterative project, Desire Lines. In nature and landscape architecture, ‘desire lines’ are alternate, unofficial routes or social trails. They represent an accumulated record of disobedience and transformation in public space. Applying this phenomenon to a process of group improvisation, this practice puts deep focus on the path-making we deploy in our thought and memory structures for movement, navigation, and structure building. Archived on colored index cards that are continually added to and revised, Mitchell and Riener, with ever-changing participants, construct a living index that feeds into their practice.

To date there have been four iterations of this work. DESIRE LINES: Prismatic Park, a 12-hour movement marathon at Madison Square Park in 2017, DESIRE LINES: RETROFIT, a durational installation with found objects at SFMoMA in January 2018, and DESIRE LINES: Translation, a process of transmission and the beginnings of archival production at the Maggie Allesee National Choreographic Center at Florida State University in March of 2018. Most recently at the Joyce Theatre, they premiered SWITCH, a spoke of Desire Lines that focuses on the mechanics of spontaneous creation.

Collaborator Cori Olinghouse will conclude the evening with a discussion exploring the ways their work builds sensorial relations or assemblages with people, places, and objects and the unruly and tactile methods of archiving that travel adjacently.