Photo : Morgane Guillou
A ritual for the imagined
Brigita Gedgaudas
Biography
Brigita Gedgaudas is an emerging protean, trans*, diasporic-Lithuanian artist working in so-called Toronto weaving together a life-long engagement in Lithuanian folk culture and training in Punking/Whacking/Waacking, vertical dance, and new media art techniques. Reconciling the dissonance between their restrictive cultural and expansive gender identity, Brigita's work finds home in glitching as a generative error to imagine a future-queer-Lithuanian tradition. Trans*muting between the physical/human and the digital/alien, Brigita explores the abject — embodying the everything-nothing potentials of voids.
Working rhizomatically, Brigita’s speculations have been screened/exhibited/performed at FADO, The Bentway, F-O-R-M, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, T.Q.F.F., Whippersnapper Gallery, SummerWorks and more. Brigita has also received awards from VTape and OCAD University for their ongoing work, “Be Vardų, Be Kojų”. Working with Diana Lopez Soto, Tanya Marquardt, Vanessa Godden, Hercinia Arts Collective, Chimerik 似不像 and more in myriad capacities ranging from projection and graphic designer, programmer, performer, photographer, and videographer they find themselves deeply interested in innovative cross-disciplinary collaboration.
Artistic Statement
I’m imagining a future — a future-past —
where the margins and center merge.
I don’t have to pick one part of myself over another
to exist amongst others.
This idea isn’t new.
I’m imagining
ancestors,
language,
gestures,
that feel more like home than the one I grew up in.
I’m imagining a place that doesn’t exist yet.
There’s a landscape, but no one populates it.
I call out,
a bee searching for their colony.
Ripened fruit ready to be devoured.
A ritual for the imagined is a performance work grounded in trans*mutation. This is done through using figures in the notation for the Lithuanian folk dance, Aštuonnytis, to generate a weaving pattern. Using the weaving pattern as a score, the weaving is shape-shifted back into movement, done in this work as a solo rather than the original dance’s traditional 16 person cast. Additionally, the 8 shafts of the weaving pattern are assigned a specific gesture referencing the process of turning flax into linen fabric, a common theme addressed in Lithuanian folk dances.
The arrangement of the gestures within the weaving pattern morph the original meanings. As gestures originate in different Lithuanian folk dances and within their own stories, putting these 8 gestures together in various configurations along with my embodied practice in the queer street dance Punking/Whacking/Waacking, ‘glitches’ the preexisting system of Lithuanian folk dance. Imbuing my own gender identity through the use of Punking/Whacking/Waacking inserts a new narrative in Lithuanian folk dance that it traditionally does not have room for. Combined with the literal shift in perspective given by dancing in the air with the use of a harness, this work builds a new movement language. One that can represent more than traditional heteronormative gender roles in Lithuanian culture and rather a more expansive, liberatory, queer experience and body.
Looking at the past, through the use of traditional Lithuanian folk dance and gesture, to realize a queer-Lithuanian future, A ritual for the imagined uses weaving as a glitch to generate new, queer movement within a traditionally binary gendered dance and culture.
