“contest/contest” is a dance piece that was born out of a search for truth in a world that contradicts reality.  In 2024, Dance and performance, much like protest and social movements, are accessible in two ways.  The first way is the witnessing of the original events; audiences and journalists witness events that are then immediately integrated into their memories.  For the rest of us, the idea of the internet remains an ever-present meta-witness, floating like a specter over everything.  Joseph Hernandez, Barret Anspach, and the dancers of Whim W’him, at the beginning of their research for this piece, decided to lean into this dynamic.  They asked themselves: “What are we doing today and how will this be perceived by the outside world? What has been done and what remains from those actions? What are actions that we can partake in that can change the course of history, in some tiny way, and bend these events toward the future that we would prefer?  What does it mean, as in the words of the poet Jennifer Michael Hecht to open the field of possibility and avoid rushing it closed”? The piece scrolls from idea to idea and invites the audience to make associations between their expectations and their present experience; joyously shifting between the absurd and the prescient, the rigorous and the maniacal.

Choreography: Joseph Hernandez and the Dancers of Whim W'Him Seattle Contemporary Dance 

Music: Barret Anspach and Joseph Hernandez 

Text: Joseph Hernandez, Michael Arellano, Maggie Nelson