The Hartford Dance Collective

"We are destroying ourselves: a dance wrecking" is a dancework for the stage, an open choreographic process, and a bodily conversation about white supremacy and American Modern Dance. It asks, “can destruction be an act of care?” Since 2020 Rebecca Pappas and her collaborators have been developing a three-volume dancework that unravels the tangled threads of white womanhood and American modern dance. These dances traverse dualities of freedom/control; sincerity/satire; tenderness/violence; beauty/monstrosity. We are destroying ourselves is a 2-3 hour event, during which one artist publicly “wrecks” a 20-minute volume of the work. “Dance wrecking,” is a practice of created by American choreographer Susan Rethorst. The work comes to Hartford Dance Collective in Spring 2024, followed by stagings in Northampton, as an event that challenges notions of singular authorship and creative ownership embedded in modernist art legacies.