04 Feb 2026 12 min read

Ferrall Residency Week 1

dancers in auditions 2026

-Monday Jan 26th-

I woke up early and ate a hotel breakfast buffet while learning about Minnesota, I ate a waffle with peanut butter, orange juice, lemon tea, some potatoes, and sausage as one woman spoke into the phone "never have I ever heard someone use jealous and Beloit in the same sentence." We're so back, baby, reader.

Hi reader,

Here I am, as the Inaugural invited guest teaching artist. The 2026 Victor E. Ferrall, Jr. Endowed Artist-in-Residence. I'm back on Beloit's campus from Monday, January 26th to February 6th. I am creating a new dance, giving a keynote lecture, visiting, professing, meeting with classes in media studies, dance, and fine arts all throughout campus.

At breakfast, I wrote a to-do list before spending 30 dollars on poster boards, name tags, xtra large sharpies, and printer ink for the auditions I planned on holding later in the evening.

I then went to the Library to meet with Archives who I had been emailing back and forth with for a few weeks.

The head archivist, who is in the first year at the college, had pulled glass plates of photography, old beloit magazines, vintage Chelonia Dance Ensemble posters, sports photos, and old sports memorabilia including a Beloit varsity sweater, an ancient pair of football trousers they had found shoved in the vents of a building that was torn down, and a winning baseball from an 1860's game between Beloit and the University of Illinois.

I had asked for the sports photos as inspiration for the students costumes, and plan on bringing the cast of students to the archives on thursday to handle the artifacts directly. I bookmarked a bunch of folders and photographs for our thursday meeting which I plan on having before the scheduled rehearsals from 10am - 12pm.

Also I grabbed some free merch - a cd of beloit songs, two post cards, and a book written by former president Victor Ferrall, who was a woodworker and writes about his process. I plan on finishing the book during my time at the college.

Afterwards I went upstairs to the Library's Book display they had me organize! Which was very exciting. I quickly created this poster and plan on creating more of a display as the students and I create posters advertising the performances we are going to be doing.

Speaking of which, I decided to have 6 performances while I'm at the college. One on Wednesday the 28th before they're ready, and then every night the 2nd to the 6th until I leave the campus.

I went to Bagels and More and got an Itallian sandwich. The woman working there said they had been open for 20 years and showed me their vintage bread cutter machine because she thought the Itallian rolls looked a bit sad that day.

I then went to Hendricks Center to get situated in Adanya's Visiting Professor office. I met with Beth, the woman who runs the building and has been coordinating my flights, housing, and keys. I met the costume designer, and then got reacquainted with two of the professors, Amy and Alicia, who I had met during my time at the college as a student. I put the final touches on my Dancers Contract, and printed off the audition sheets as Adanya rolled in and we started setting up Studio 1 for the audition to begin.

3 students showed up. 2 seniors and one sophomore. I taught a line dance, pieces of phrase work inspired by Tere's choreography adapted to this different of this dance language and then taught pieces of the solo I created for Stunning!. The students were hilarious, eager, and exited to be challenged by the complexity and unexpectedness of the movement.

I ended up just barely introducing the green screen video process when we started just talking about Beloit, about the dance program, about out hometowns, and I told them they were all welcomed to be a part of the piece if they were able to commit to the schedule.

Afterwards Adanya and I planned a ballet class before heading to the restaurant behind the hotel to get dinner and beer. We watched the ending of I Love You Forever before I sent emails to students, the archivist, a few student orgs, and professors who I will be visiting later this week.

Cheers, goodnight.

-Tuesday Jan 27th-

Joe Bookman's Capstone: 10:00 – 11:45am

Teach Adanya's Ballet Class: 12:00 – 2:00pm

Rick Rose's Class: 2:00 – 3:15pm

Cullyn Murphy's MULTI: 3:15 – 4:00pm

Rehearsal: 5:00 – 9:00pm

-Wednesday Jan 28th-

Breakfast with Gina

Meet with Cullyn

Cue/Term	Meaning/Function
screenshot! dragging! done!	Clear the screen/stage
background set!	Setting screenshot as background
microwaving	Download the video (480p)
behind!	When green screen moves behind someone
down cheese left! up cheese right!	Directional cue for stage movement
greenup	Green screen directions
loop [1,2,3]- 5,6,7,8	Countdown to get a clean synchronized loop start
loop [1,2,3] done	Loop completion cue
screen goblin	Refers to Avi’s role during performance
family photo	Signals start of screen capture sequence
Stunning does not equal beauty	Aesthetic reminder / motto of the work
gallop	Movement term: physical zombie horse like gallop

Finish Poster for Chelonia

Rehearsal

-Thursday Jan 29th-

Archives pt. 2

-Friday Jan 30th-

Keynote

As students enter, Stunning! is playing with low volume.

We can't figure out how to get the music to play from my speakers without this awful doubling effect, that makes the entire work unwatchable. So, I bend the little speech mic to the speakers of my laptop and go from there, about 20 students arrive and a few faculty members and I begin.

I began the lecture, the keynote, with "Notes on Timeline"

Notes on Timeline

Now with Links!

Notes on Timeline.pdf

48 KB

I do Apple's neat little launchpad trick and swipe from window to window on my extended display. I swipe down my timeline, pausing to showcase different video editing styles I have taken on. I start with my time in Beloit, and how by graduating into the world of the pandemic, I was forced to shift my professional festival and residency involvement to digital and hybrid formats.

I swipe and swipe showing videos from Fulbright, from my UIUC audition, Queerly Contemporary, This Body Lives, Cetacean, Midwest Princess, The Lace, and the thesis, Stunning!.

Some time had passed. Some things had happened. I went to Taiwan on a Fulbright. I had spent hours running a kindergarten classroom. I learned how to make Zoom work for me and I applied to grad school.

For the audition, I created a Zoom performance around a choreographic exploration of the desktop. Here, I was my own stagehand, my own performer, and my own cameraman

The audience I was considering stared at me from the same screen I stared into all day. The jobs I had lined up, the festivals I had submitted my work to, pivoted to digital platforms, and so did I.

I create performances asking what if someone else were recording my screen and saw what I did online all day?

The DIY nature of IGTV Live performance began to reframe time as something once again to be intimately negotiated.

And an entire technical vocabulary began to emerge.

That of: I'm Going Live. Send me your Screenshots. Any New Filters? Hey Chat! Hi Chat! Chat! Hey Chat! Whats up Chat!

I transition to the title of my talk "Choreographing the Screen" by sharing the compilation of videos which live on my website that showcase the work I want to complete while at Beloit before reading from "Notes on Choreography."

Notes on Choreography

Sourced from the thesis

Notes on Choreography.pdf

616 KB

The last dance piece I created, Stunning!, explored what it means to create beauty for the screen.

And how to “stun” audiences into attention when navigating this emerging market of the Attention Economy.

The aesthetics of the piece come from not only my technical training as a dancer but the technical requirements for making dance in the COVID pandemic-era shift towards the digital.

The timeline in which widely accessible technology has progressed from telephones to instant video communication often feels like science fiction.

Telecommunication technology like that of Zoom entered our daily life in such a rapid way that culture is still trying to adapt to it.

And the dances I have been making, stage the stress and vulnerability of navigating a developing future in front of an audience.

The unmuting, the duo identification, the video pinning, screensharing, bluetooth, syncing, syncing, syncing, the digital labour, that we have been forced to learn how to do In order to keep eyes on us in an era of fried attention.

During performance I want dancers to be more than performers doing choreography, I want Somaticly-informed technicians, rethinking attention, surveillance, and the politics of dancing under conditions of endless scrolling.

And I want dance that honors the generational stratification that has developed in the post-COVID dystopian authoritarian time we find ourselves in. The "midsetlist" (a Beloit tradition which ended in 2022) I create this work from, includes students who has witnessed a televised genocide, and have seen the confederate flag fly in the halls of the U.S. Capitol.

From my own diary in 2020 as a 21 year old college student I wrote, "I no longer have a need or desire to be in a world that has proven itself so poorly designed for the comfort, safety, or future of community and of artistic living."

This is honestly where I begin to make a choreography from.

And allowed rehearsals to have this feeling of importance. My way of stepping towards a better experience online and offline. I believe we need spaces that build the physical skills we need to create a better world with our very limited time and unstable future.

Through full-out dancing with the cast, I find the choreography language one which stages: a spider-like, forced high-arch physicality with a teetering, infantile rhythm where dancers let their long limbs flail and their boneless feet slap the floor.

There is no traditional engagement with technique, but rather a desperate locomotion born out of rehearsal-as-performance.

The drama comes from a disorienting doubleness, a mix of two monsters that lives in the body of the performer. There is the trained body and the body misusing rigor. The rigor of Graham and Limon inform how I throw myself around the studio in a way that depends on looking like a glitch.

The movement aims to carry the ache of being more adaptable than the structures meant to lead us. Manifesting in tantrum, refusal, and the impossibility of fitting humanity onto the screen.

What do I need to do to keep your attention?

In order to create a dance that communicates the experience of being online, I developed four central terms:

choreographic looping,

audience as active editor,

desktop as stage,

and critical choice.

Looping

My thesis rehearsals did not begin in a studio but rather: a screen-lit bedroom, somewhere between the panic of lockdown and the possibility of working from home. Every day felt the same, and time itself began to loop. The same format for content, the same experience of lethargy and draining from scrolling, the same screentime everyday with nothing to show.

What do we create when facing a future where we're unsure what could happen next? This is the logic the dancing operates under.

I become a broken umbrella sticking out of the garbage. My dangerous metal limbs bent in frightening angles, the roundness of the umbrella now a forgotten illusion when you see me uncovered. My metal monster hand that once provided protection, sanctuary, comfort now betrays you with my true form. The mechanics that make that illusion possible, the engineering of the everyday, failed.

While in the dance, dancers must do very serious work, this humor thing, this building a green screen thing. It infects the performance, allowing the throwaway of improvised movement to be visible just enough.

The two positions I return to when creating movement are that of the baby robin that lived in my garage, and screenneck.

The robin cranes its neck at an impossible angle, mouth agape, helpless, hungry, and becomes to me this alternative to a now default position of Screenneck.

Screenneck being that awful, cramped, barely looking up position with neck muscles weak and engagement almost entirely from the chin. Eyes baggy and tired, with hands planted into one's chest. Lifting only from the shoulders and splayed at the keyboard.

There is no technological savior and I doubt there will be.

There is no current technological innovation that will save us.

There is no tech that will save our humanity.

A melancholic tone of the dance begins to take shape for me as I watch the dance. I am confused for the longest time, but it's because of the mix of the music, and the commitment of the dancers, and the insistence to get this shoddy technology to work wonders, and the animalistic-innovative-sissy-strangeness of the alien baby moves, and the fact that these are all in defiance of an easy fix, of a technological save.

The images that the screen projects back to the audience exist because of the dancers' hard work on stage. There is no easy way to make this dance work, to make the components fit, the costumes organic, the makeup lived-in. It had to be made through the everyday commitment the dancers made to be here. We had to choose to do this dance every day, to struggle through the screen, to put our possible technological failures on display.

-Saturday Jan 31st-

Reader,

I had this plan to go home every night and recount my day and write a little diary entry for you, for me, for archival purposes. But I guess that didn't happen. Most of this was written retroactively on Feb 5th.

Reader,

As ICE terrorizes communities, as I feel mounting pressure to learn how to pack gunshot wounds and as fear begins to take hold of how and where students feel comfortable showing up, as a call for a nation wide shut down is shared on instagram, as I show up as a guest to classes where the first twenty minutes are spent talking about what to do in the face of tyranical fascist authoritarianism, about the old beloit vs new beloit, I write this and try to get students to? dance.

Reader,

I want to share this experience with you, I do, I want to feel and honour this return to a place that holds so many memories. A place I learned to be in. lol. I want to share with you my keynote lecture reader, I want to share my silly little meals I've been eating, I don't have a kitchenette reader, I need to eat some veggies and garlic reader, please. Soon reader, lets meet for veggies and garlic. But reader, Oh sweet reader, I want to share with you how loving and bright the students involved are reader, how despite the times, I show up to classrooms of excited young people who are engaging with questions and thoughts and are animated and excited and want to know more. Daniel Texted me after the Keynote "Gabe, First and foremost, congratulations on last night. Really wonderful presentation. And while the audience wasn’t huge, it was highly engaged." Which is heartwarming. And the students did ask about monsters, dramaturgy, attention economies, choreographic methods, staging technological failure, tantrum, and violence, reader. And, It's been hard getting them to come to rehearsals. We can only rehearse for two hours because they have to go to dinner. We are struggling to find how this is going to work, but, it's gonna work I have faith.