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Rachel Gill

Dancer, Performer, Amateur Filmmaker
@rachheyhello

My artistic practice centers on performance, primarily as a dancer in collaboration with other artists and more recently as a choreographer. I am propelled by how performance facilitates relational possibilities, an erotic aperture into surprise and fantasy through which one might recover a less-moored version of the self. My choreographic impulse favors physically demanding improvisation, pursuing human encounters that are interstitial to our normal productive lives. Forms that resist immediate legibility entice me; the bizarre and the dreamlike, the ugly and the mundane, embracing the compulsion to look, to linger, to keep looking.

In parallel, I maintain an amateur film practice, working primarily with Super 8mm. I’m drawn to its slowness and tactility; its demand for skill-building makes me feel useful rather than outmoded. The analog format encourages a dialogue between critical thinking and intuition, much like improvisation. Favoring analog in a digital world is disruptive, restoring or perhaps queering my affair with images. The material itself is fragile and decays over time, much like the body, engaged in a durational performance of disappearing.

My dance background is vital to my filmmaking. Experiencing the world through movement shapes how I frame and edit film. I see the camera as an extension of my body, an auxiliary organ that I’m both sensually connected to and mystified by. Repetition becomes a tool for transformation, a keeper of time, of steps, and of frames. Therefore, heightening the ephemerality of all things. I embrace the tension between being a skilled dancer and an amateur filmmaker, finding pleasure and possibility in that exchange.

Photo by Evan Ray Suzuki