Descendance
2021
Centers on a drone-filmed video performance situated inside an emptied swimming pool at Seattle's George Washington Carver Center. In the film, interdisciplinary tap dancer Michael J. Love moves across a large American flag stenciled in topsoil. As Love dances, the flag's form transforms, turning choreography into a living soil-map of generational lineage, cultural inheritance, and embodied history.
The film is supported by original music by Jazz composer Joseph C. Dyson Jr., whose score underscores the choreography and temporal weight of the soil-flag transformation. Additionally, the pool design was executed by Eto Otitigbe, whose minimalist interventions intersect the stenciled flag as a permanent backdrop to the ephemeral nature of soil.