-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, the costume designer, and got reaquainted with two of the professors I knew during my time at the college, Amy and Alicia. 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 tere's choreography adapted to a different language, and then pieces of a solo I created for Stunning!. The students were hilarious, eager, and exited to be challenged. We ended up just introducing them to the green screen video idea and 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 visting this week.

Cheers, goodnight.

-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.

Reader,

As ICE terrorizes midwestern 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.

Reader,

I feel like i need to share my schedule and how I've been spending my time...

I want to share this with you, I do, I want to feel and honour this return to a place that I learned to be in. 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. But reader, Oh sweet reader, I want to share with you how loving and bright the students 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 about monsters, reader, and dramaturgy, and attention economies, and choreographic methods, and staging technological failure and tantrum and violence. and reader, It's been hard getting them to come to rehearsals. We can only rehearse for two hours because they have to go to dinner, reader. We are struggling to find how this is going to work, but, it's gonna work i have some faith.

Ferrall Artist in Residence

TL;DR Thesis! ⇧THE WHOLE THESIS HERE⇧ Hi. My MFA thesis, Stunning!, was performed January 30th - February 1st, 2025 in Urbana Illinois Developed across 27 two-hour rehearsals, 4 rehearsal showings, 1 designer run, 1 invited dress, and 1 full production tech period. It can be summarized as a dance

Goob OnlineGabriel Bruno Eng Gonzalez

Notes on Timeline

• Beloit 2016 - 2020
• Queerly Contemporary Festival - 2020
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8pWwlFupsw
• Fulbright Taiwan - 2021 - 2022
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXLA_IMNcW0
• Estrellx Supernova - 2021
  • (can not find video)
• This Body Lives
  • (can not find video)
• Elevate Dance Chicago 2022
  • return to the gua bao
• University of Illinois - MFA - 2022 - 2025
  • cetacean
  • midwest princess - https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/10dQjWOBAIYB4W9AqRXyTny_YxgK-wD3f
  • stunning - https://www.goob.online/stunning/
• Tere' O Connor Dance Company - 2023 - now
  • https://www.instagram.com/reel/DRSX6wHkbzv/?hl=en
  • https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/arts/dance/tere-oconnor-construct-a-guy-nyla.html
  • https://newyorklivearts.org/event/construct-a-guy-and-the-lace/
  • https://newyorklivearts.org/event/construct-a-guy-1984-the-lace-2025/

Notes on Choreography:

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. 

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 an 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. 

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. 

Still from "Charlie Jones On The Computer" Henry Selick (dir.), Coraline, 2009

It is informed by those illustrations in ergonomic chair ads, the grotesque posture diagrams with red glowing pain emanating from misshapen human spines. 

Through full-out dancing with the cast, I found myself choreographing a spider-like, forced high-arch physicality with a teetering, infantile rhythm. One 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 came from a disorienting doubleness, a mix of two monsters: trained bodies misusing the rigor of Graham and Limon to throw themselves into a body that can not perfectly perform both without glitch. That doubleness carries the ache of being more adaptable than the structures meant to lead us. Manifesting in tantrum, refusal, and the impossibility of fitting into the screen.

Solo performance emerges from this stew: becoming a baby Oni barreling through a village square, stealing liquor bottles, eating raw fish, befriending cranes who bow their necks and lift him into the clouds. The creature in this solo is monstrous, but light. Stunning but parody. A parody of Eros blooming into something queerer, more excessive, and refusing. The solo work morphed into what I began to think of as the dance of the internet troll. It is danced with a committed frustrated yet trained body. A body that finds beauty in the control of sudden and explosive shifts. A choreography of refusal and individualism. 

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.

Notes on the Screen:

Notes on Why 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. 

Performance happened when I screenshared what goes on between my browser tabs, flooding the stage, the screen, with movement and yet, the only choreography of my body was that of my fingers. 

That of swipes, scrolls, pinches, and drags. And without a need to rest from bodily exhaustion, without a need to return to a work schedule, a school schedule, I swiped, and scrolled and pinched and dragged until the screen glitched, the sound failed, or the batteries died.

"Relief washed over me as I closed the computer screen. My eyes were sore again. But this time, the screen had performed a transformation. I had undergone a metamorphosis: I was now a college graduate. My degree had been conferred through pixels. Through the screen, I became the first degree-holding Chinese Mexican son in my family."

I spent the months from spring break to graduation sheltering in place. Watching, waiting, scrolling. Scrolling. Scrolling.

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. 

Screenshot from my dance film, Things are Not Fine premiered in October 2020

Notes from creating Things are Not Fine

December 2020 – Chicago, Illinois

I am in Chicago with my mom, my brothers, and our dog, Lucy. This is what I look like today. This is what the sky looks like. Here’s the weather. Here’s my Spotify playlist. Here are my favorite photos right now.

You can see it all on my screen. Are you here?

“I’ve been rethinking time and how to measure it… my camera roll is the closest thing I have to a calendar.”

I’m making things that feel silly. Maybe that’s the point. To try. To keep trying. Even if it fails. I’m spiraling sometimes alone in my bedroom. I feel out of control, out of routine, out of desire. I feel addicted to the idea of being seen and yet I am terrified of it, too. 

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! 

https://letterboxd.com/film/castration-movie-anthology-iii-year-of-the/watch/

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation Hardcover – June 23, 2020

by Kristin Kobes Du Mez 

The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy Hardcover – April 1, 2022

by Philip S. Gorski (Author), Samuel L. Perry (Author), Jemar Tisby (Foreword)

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America Paperback – May 1, 2018

by Richard Rothstein (Author)

James (Pulitzer Prize Winner): A Novel Hardcover – March 19, 2024

by Percival Everett (Author)

The Trees: A Novel Kindle Edition

by Percival Everett (Author)