Making “Potemkin village”
Making "Potemkin village"
Edited by кir alshanetsky
“ignore all possible concepts and possibilities […]
just make it, babe, make it”
– Charles Bukowski, “making it”
I want to take this opportunity to say something about the state of the/my world(s). More specifically, I want to name a feeling because identifying a feeling offers relational possibilities. This is what I aim to do through dance: trace the point where private feeling meets "the state of the world," a phrase that easily compartmentalizes lived experience. It can be easier to be told how you feel than it is to name your feeling for yourself. I am trying to be rigorous about feelings.
Here is an orientation point:
I am not going to pretend like the commonality is obvious. The image on the left is of Kijǒng-dong, a Potemkin village on North Korea’s half of the DMZ. The image on the right is a screenshot of my Instagram feed. Both rely on outward presentation to conceal interior realities. Both also reveal something about how I negotiate and perform identity.
A "Potemkin village" refers to a façade erected to conceal an undesirable reality, creating the illusion that things are better than they are [2]. The term comes from Grigory Potemkin, who was mythologized as constructing false villages to impress Empress Catherine the Great during her tour of Crimea in 1787. Whether historically accurate or not, the story persists because it captures a familiar logic: spectacle can stand in for reality.
Here, the mythology of romance becomes its own Potemkin village; he loved her so much that he emulated whole false towns to create the illusion that colonization efforts in the Ukraine had progressed further than they had.
The term has since grown to describe any façade that manages perception rather than reality. A spin on a story. A cover-up. The point is not simply to hide what exists, but to direct attention elsewhere—to make you feel you are not receiving the whole story, because you are not.
The dance I am making is about the façades we construct and maintain to survive, and the selves that remain hidden behind them. It asks what happens when those structures collapse, when the version of ourselves built for public consumption can no longer hold, and we are forced to negotiate the world, and one another, from a place of attention and presence.
What interests me is less the existence of these façades than the feeling they produce: contradiction, paralysis, uncertainty about how to move through the world at all. I am making this dance from within that condition. I am not claiming that dance is direct action. I do, however, believe that dance creates a space where ideas can be worked through in the body, where movement and the shared experience of embodiment become ways of communicating desire—for connection, for dissent, for a different kind of world.
On Instagram, I become a version of myself optimized for circulation. I post rehearsal photos, travel, grant announcements, upcoming performances: evidence of a life in motion. As a working artist, this is partly survival; visibility begets opportunity. As a trans person, there is potentially a sense of self-determination in choosing the images through which I am seen. And yet, the feed remains a Potemkin village: a carefully maintained exterior that tells a coherent story while obscuring the uncertainty, boredom, grief, and labor that make that story possible.
I know this façade is incomplete, and I maintain it anyway. The post that convinces you I am thriving also conceals my ambivalence about participating in a platform that extracts attention for profit. It conceals, too, the contradictions of moving through a world shaped by surveillance and ongoing violence toward QTPOC communities. In the same feed I can scroll past a polished portrait of a trans, Jewish celebrity and another calling attention to that celebrity's continued inaction in the face of Zionist propaganda. I do not cite this to expose hypocrisy from a safe distance.
I am implicated in the contradiction. It is the condition under which I am making this work.
One idea shaping my choreography comes from Naomi Klein's concept of the "digital doppelganger." Beyond the self we consciously curate online, she argues that tech companies assemble another self from the data we leave behind—a double increasingly capable of predicting and influencing our actions. Every data point scraped from our online life makes that double "more vivid, more complex, more able to nudge our behavior in the real world." [3]
There is something insidious about an app sold as convenience when its business model depends on extracting attention. Convenience itself becomes a Potemkin village, directing our gaze away from the systems quietly monetizing it. I increasingly struggle to tell where self-expression ends and optimization begins.
The feed begins to stand in for the work of living itself. Heart-ing a friend's post masquerades as maintaining a friendship. Scrolling algorithmically curated headlines masquerades as staying informed. Consuming an endless stream of humor masquerades as personal fulfillment. Instead, I drift further from presence, trading embodied experience for a succession of small, frictionless interactions. The feed becomes a microcosm of the larger world, its continual overwhelm making it increasingly difficult to experience that world somatically.
Knowing is not necessarily a comfort. I am not self-assured; I am paranoid. The more I try to disentangle the media I consume from its propagandistic aims, the more impossible it feels to locate a reality untouched by power. That impossibility is part of what drives my dance-making.
Dance insists on presence in its making, performing, and receiving. It calls upon our ability to make another choice, to move the body in ways that resist prescription. As an audience member, you are asked not simply to consume a work but to participate in its meaning. That meaning exceeds the performance itself, taking shape through the images, memories, and sensations that accumulate as the dance unfolds through time.
Since Spring 2025, I have been working with Caroline Butcher, Ondine Geary, Jesús Muñoz, and myself on a series of improvisational scores that have become the foundation of this dance.
Potemkin village (2026) process footage featuring dancers Butcher, Geary, and Muñoz at RedLine Contemporary Art Center (Denver, CO).
In one of our first rehearsals, we worked with a score in which paired dancers would travel across the room, attempting to perfectly mirror one another’s movements. The score eventually grew to incorporate a third person, or a “shadow,” who was responsible for finding some trailing point of relation to the paired dancers, then interjecting and subsuming the role of one of the original dancers. The score asks how deeply we can listen through shared movement. It also confronts the impossibility of true empathy: if we cannot live as one another, how can we understand another's experience? I am interested in the attempt nonetheless, and the new empathies that attempt makes possible.
Process footage featuring dancers Butcher & Geary at RedLine Contemporary Art Center (Denver, CO).
If mirroring reflects the self, unison risks dissolving it into the ensemble. Growing out of this initial mirroring score, I tasked two of my dancers with moving across space while finding both movement and words (a la Saturday Night Live’s Garth & Kat) in synchronization [4]. What can happen when left with no other choice but to rely on one another to forge the next moment we experience?
The score also asks whether unison demands uniformity or can instead privilege idiosyncrasy within conformity.
I am looping back to my initial invocation of stuckness, and to the possibility that accepting overwhelm and powerlessness might itself become a catalyst for movement. I think of unison as a practice of continuing to choose one another despite uncertainty. Rather than overcoming stuckness, the dance asks what kinds of movement become possible once we accept that uncertainty may be the condition under which we move.
Process footage featuring dancers Butcher & Muñoz at RedLine Contemporary Art Center (Denver, CO).
In a score I have been particularly interested in recently, I ask our ensemble of dancers to move across space while remaining physically connected at a painfully glacial pace. There are moments of ease when our bodies advance only millimeters at a time. There are also moments of deep tension, even pain, when weight yields to gravity or a dancer reaches an axial tipping point. Maintaining such extreme slowness can be profoundly frustrating when our bodies have been conditioned by capitalism to value speed, productivity, and forward momentum. I think of this slowness as an intervention against the pace at which we are expected to process information. What becomes visible when we refuse urgency? What do we notice when we allow ourselves to inhabit time rather than race through it?
How might slowing down return us to felt experience and remind us of the possibilities that remain when we choose to engage with the world autonomously?
For a long time, I believed dance could offer fleeting glimpses of another way of living together—not an escape from the present, but a temporary reorganization of it. In the studio and in performance, we practice forms of attention, care, and interdependence that can feel increasingly difficult to access elsewhere. I still believe in those possibilities, even while recognizing that no choreography can resolve the very real conditions of class disparity, racial and gender inequity, or climate collapse.
Still, I remain committed to convening with my dancers, sharing our visions and dreams for how this work might materialize. I remain committed to manifesting those desires into performance because, bottom line, we deserve to see our dreams come true in ways both big and small. Making this dance feels like our way of choosing a different kind of world: combating dissociation through presence and aliveness and confronting our perceived lack of power through the simple, continual act of choosing what happens next.
We are making a dance in which exteriors come to stand in for interiority, and in which the choices available to us shrink and expand from moment to moment. It is a dance about the selves we share and the selves we repress, about the shadows those repressed selves cast, and about what happens when we choose to confront them. Somewhere in that world live Garth & Kat, Mary-Kate & Ashley, and the impossible desire to touch the grass in the Windows XP "Bliss" screensaver.
It’s a lot to take in.
And still, we choose what happens next.
Potemkin village (2026) is supported by National Performance Network’s Creation Fund, with performances co-commissioned by RedLine Contemporary Art Center (Denver, CO), Longmont Museum (Longmont, CO), and FACT/SF (San Francisco, CA). Additional support from Denver Theatre District. Potemkin village will premiere in November 2026 at RedLine. Ticketing and event details to be announced.