Brigita Gedgaudas

Be Vardų, Be Kojų

The interactive iteration of a larger investigation into queer futures within Lithuanian culture. This is a live, interactive, projection that imagines a glitched, queer folk dance circle guided by the movements of the human within it.

“Be Vardų, Be Kojų (Without Names, Without Legs) is an experimental, interactive projection that complicates and glitches the binary tradition of Lithuanian folk dance. Stemming from dissonance felt as a queer person within gendered Lithuanian cultural expressions, this work is a practice in speculative fiction: imagining what a queer folk dance tradition might look like through the metaphor of a glitch. Utilizing digital space as a mirror to heteronormative society, photograms of specific male and female denoted folk dance steps dance with the human player in the center of the installation. In the process of translating and digitizing human movement, what was once a connotative gesture is removed from its context, resituating the movement in an imaginary, digital, queer world. This removal of meaning through glitching the body acts as a generative error; as the photograms work through translating human movement through their pixels, the jittery and jolty effects of the transmutation show how associations of meaning with movement fall flat on a queer body. The queer body – in its rejection of rigid boundaries and labels – is incomprehensible in Lithuanian language and subsequently, culture, becoming an error in Lithuanian society. In this way, the error or glitch becomes the queer/alien body that mirrors human experience, revealing through generative errors, the cracks within gendered and national conceptions of the world. As a person that embodies both slippages between binaries as well as nations, digital space becomes a landscape for queer worldbuilding that allows errors and indeterminacies to take shape and hold space. Situated in a circle, a form used both in Lithuanian ‘round-dances’ and street dance cyphers, this work encourages the human player to explore movement and find liberation in it. The accompanying music, a house remix of a Lithuanian folk dance, plays on a loop, entrancing the player to lose themselves in this speculative fantasy as they might on a dance floor in a club. Calling on literal understandings of the word ‘folk’ and the community-oriented, queer-originating culture within street dance styles like W*acking and House, this work aims to create a safe space for collective reimagining through improvised movement. The interactive nature of this work allows for play and exploration with the digital world that ultimately leads to the destabilization of the body as a distinctive human touchstone. This destabilization then becomes a place of critique and reimagining of what Lithuanian culture can look like and who it can include.”