2021 another audience artist

David Guzman is a multidisciplinary performer, dancer and lichen lover. He has performed in queer bars, traditional stages, parks and forests. His most recent performances have been in Bread and Puppet Theatre’s The Persians, which toured in New York and Chicago. He is currently a member of the Headlong Dance Theater Performance Institute cohort, a collaborator and dancer for Mina Nishimura, a translator of the book Experiments in Choreology, or, Where the Soviet Gesture Has Led Us and assistant to artists Ishmael Houston-Jones and Ni’Ja Whitson. Living and researching at another audience in 2021 has radically shifted David’s urges as a performer towards acknowledging the land that makes and unmakes him every day.

David Guzman

While at Black Hole Hollow, David cultivated specific rituals of embodying lichens sensorially, guiding his attention towards and through the knowledge accumulated with and about them in an attempt to imaginatively become them. He also developed rituals called “wandering, listening and observing” in an attempt to explore land acknowledgement as an ongoing, relational,  embodied practice. Through his performance practice of visitations to certain parts of the land, David took the proposition of the residency very seriously: to perform for the land and to consider what shifting attention away from the theater of the human gaze could open up and reveal.