My Resonant Image / Exposed / Exposé (working title)

(currently a work-in-process)

Creator | Dalton Alexander

Performers | Dalton Alexander (US), Sarah Bucher (CH), Simon Ramseier (CH)

Photos | Arnaud Beelen (BE)

Sound | MRI recording found on YouTube with the addition of a drone by Dalton Alexander

Research has taken place in San Francisco with Juliet Paramor and in Brussels at Tic Tac Art Centre with the above performers.

Using the incessant drone and repeated pounding of an MRI machine, we seek to explore what it means to endure. The sound itself makes one itch, squirm, and run away - or at least make it stop. But in an MRI, one must be absolutely still for close to 30 minutes. At what moment do we want to give up? What is our impetus when we reach that breaking point? What fuels our resistance to that breaking point?

In 2019, I experienced a series of injuries that put me in an MRI machine multiple times. As my arm was numb for 25 minutes, all I could do was breathe deeply. Then I began to think about the trauma that this very moment was causing me even though it is a key player in western healing. What type of trauma is caused by healing practices? Can they be more traumatic than the experiences we are attempting to relieve?

Our chosen medium for researching this is task-based improvisation; we are interested in going to the point where it feels like the task is researched enough and “complete" (a breaking point) and then going beyond that, to keep exploring. Often, something new, deeper, and more meaningful does come up. 

An MRI captures images of the body’s insides by creating magnetic fields and sending radio waves through them, thus reading the density of human tissue layer by layer. How is this imaging of layer upon layer, deeper and deeper, manifested? How do we access this somatically and how does it become physical?