Barnard Movement Lab features stunning coming-of-age exhibition.

The Movement Lab is a single room, dimly lit, and divided by a curtain. To the left was a small screen, in a corner one could certainly miss, featuring a video of dancer and choreographer  NiNi Dongnier, balancing her entire body on her hands against a gigantic ball of grass. Immediately, I felt placed in a sensory multiverse. Throughout my entire experience here, I couldn’t shake off the feeling of being situated in vast silence, yet it was comforting.  

I went to the Movement Lab’s exhibition, “It’s factual, so vast,” curated and directed by NiNi Dongnier. The exhibition has four different screens playing at the same time. I started with the dual screen display on the far right, called In Another Green World. To the right of the screen was a stage performance that played with a strong contrast of stage light illuminating the dancing figures and total darkness beyond the stage. To the left, three dancers wandered and danced on what could be a school playground. They linked arms, pulled a hair tie from the other, and ran. The film then transitioned to the three people standing inside a tunnel, right at the end, with light shining in. They stretched their hands to both sides of themselves. 

Headphones were provided for this screening. Through the headphones, the words “she was a visitor” echoed. In Another Green World made me think about coming-of-age. Embodied within those words is an upward motion, an arrival to adulthood and an end to childhood. Reaching for light, the ending imagery of the film on the left, was an apt motif of adolescent confusion and wrestling to reconcile with the growing, changing self. To the right, a similar stretch of the body on stage conveyed a similar imagery. 

Scenes of Dongnier walking amongst broad swaths of grassland, pasture, and wide roads recurred in a piece displayed on another wall, Every Motion is a Ritual. In the background, I could hear “NiNi, where are you?” repeated and reverberated across the room. My choice to start with In Another Green World was serendipitous because this film felt like a continuation of the previous one. Dongnier walked on grassy lands, illuminated by sunlight, and steady on her own path. Chinese proverbs describing natural beauty accompanied the film. Along the way, she hugged a large ball of grass, the same one that she used to balance her body against in the film in the entryway, and strolled alongside cows grazing on the pasture. The only constant was herself, walking into a new light. 

The last film of the exhibition I saw was You and Me, We Grant this Picture in the Marvelous. It featured Dongnier sitting on a desk with surgical gloves, moving her hand and upper body—the only part of her visible in the film—with the sun shining through a window. At one point, she shook her head up and down, bowed down, and then shot up. In another moment, she moved her arm in a wavelike motion, letting the rays of light dance across her body. Yoshikazu Mera’s rendition of Handel’s Lascia ch’io pianga (Let Me Lament) played in the background, telling its own narrative of exerting one’s breath of life against pain and mysterious fate. Following the storyline that I built for myself in choosing my path, Dongnier seemed to be extending the desire for light in In Another Green World to You and Me, We Grant this Picture in the Marvelous. The desire for light, which is also a desire for life, was always a form of struggle in these films. As she moved her body against the empty space, she exerted, again, a force of her life. 

“It’s factual, so vast” is an exhibition of performative moving images directed by NiNi Dongnier. It was presented at the Movement Lab in Milstein from September 13 to October 4, 2024. To learn more about the exhibition’s performers and other details, click on this link. 

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