MobiuX is an ongoing intermedial performance project that explores the inner and outer inscriptions of movement.

The work originated in 2019 as a collaborative research project at York University, exploring gesture and embodiment in dance archives. It has since been performed by various dancers and non-dancers at different events, community workshops, and installation spaces. These include Open Work (2019), Variations on Broken Lines (2020), Shared View (2022), LaMashu Artspace (2022), and Nuit Blanche Toronto (2022).

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Interior and exterior expressions of movement are explored through various choreographic methods. The choreography, based on costumes, is created by the physical and psychological effects of the materials as experienced through touch, gravity, spatial orientation, and tension. It also comes from a continuous dwelling in the space between one's own skin, that of others, and the costume. The material of the costume and the somatic intention that brought it to life form the basis for the choreography. The transformative potentials embedded in the costume generate expressions of movement, subjective relations to inner and outer expressions, and openness for emerging communication and relations. The folding process involves both inside and outside surfaces, creating a space for gestures and embodied memories; an interior is a fold of the exterior, where the boundaries between them are unstable and volatile, elusive, as each one is folded into the other.

"The inside and the outside: the infinite fold separates or moves between matter and soul, the facade and the closed room, the outside and the inside. Because it is a virtuality that never stops dividing itself, the line of inflection is actualized in the soul but realized in matter, each one on its own side... an exterior always on the outside, an interior always on the inside. An infinite 'receptivity,' an infinite spontaneity."

– Gilles Deleuze, The Fold (35)

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Inspired by the mathematical object, the Möbius strip, band, or loop, it's a surface formed by attaching the ends of a strip of paper together with a half-twist. The Möbius strip is a non-orientable surface, meaning that within it, one cannot consistently distinguish between clockwise and counterclockwise turns. Thus, the Möbius ring allows us to contemplate the continuity of two fields or planes when, at any given moment, moving over one plane (inside) negates the possibility of moving over the other plane (outside). When one side is outside, the other is inside, and when the outside becomes inside, the other side becomes absent. Although they are connected, the ratio of inside to outside is a ratio of continuity. This journey of the Möbius strip can be repeated ad infinitum.

Can we consider the body as representing the inside and outside of the Möbius strip? Our body is a historical and cultural product, produced by the interaction of physical and psychological inscriptions (Grosz 1994). Our inner psyche interprets the body as an external representation of the self, intertwining the interior and exterior into a cohesive sense of being. We are oscillating between inner and cultural inscriptions of gesture.

We are “along the path of the inversion of the Möbius strip, at the point of twisting or self-transformation in which the inside flips over to become the outside, or the outside turns over on itself to become the inside”(Grosz, 1994)

That “paradoxical space” make invisible the tension between our inner and outer inscriptions of identity (Rose 1993). The space between inside and outside is a state of being in which borders of identities are constantly shifting, changing, replacing, and relocating, constructing and reconstructing body, memories, identity, and place (Rose 1993). The difference between subject and object, self and other, and the individual and the world is lost in the flesh. (Merleau-Ponty 1968). Looking at ourselves through the eyes of another, we are attuned to senses on the other.

“The body is lost outside of the world and its goals, fascinated by the unique occupation of floating in Being with another life, of making itself the outside of its inside and the inside of its outside. And henceforth movement, touch, vision, applying themselves to the other and to themselves, return toward their source and, in the patient and silent labor of desire, begin the paradox of expression.” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968).

As a space for research, this performative project has been documented through various experimental recording methods where the movement materials are incorporated into different media and artwork, including screendance, moving-image, photographs, and installations. As an ongoing exploration, this project is an open-ended intermedial artwork that is subject to different kinds of iteration and modulation across materials, time, and space.

• Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: UP Minnesota, 1993. Print.

• Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press (1994).

• Gillian Rose, Feminism 6 Geography; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

• Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by A. Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (p143-144).

• Rubidge, Sarah, 2000, “Identity and the Open Work”, in Preservation Politics.