james rouvelle

The excerpts above were from a showing of Part 1 we did at PAGEANT (Thanks to Owen Prum) in Brooklyn with choreographer Jude Markey-Smith. The entire work, described below, will be performed in NYC in late spring ’26 and in Europe during summer ’26. Specific dates/venues will be on our about page in early spring ’26. Below is our working premise.

About Thresholds: Of the Measurable & the Unmeasurable, A performance for dancer, sculptural field, live sound, and projection.

The piece is in three movements. The first is cosmological order. The second is psychological enclosure. The third is phenomenological participation.

First Movement — The Pulse of Geometry

The stage begins as a measured geometry: a rectangle inscribed according to the Golden Mean, its diagonals and reciprocals calculated and drawn in tape across the floor. Before the audience arrives, the performers calculate and mark this field — its proportions echoing an underlying harmonic order. At intersections of these lines, sculptural objects are placed: modular forms of raw balsa wood, assembled into varying heights and angles. Their dimensions determine the gravity of their presence. Each emits a subtle field, attracting or repelling movement, exerting force through proportion rather than power.

A single dancer enters the illuminated stage. The lighting is full and even, as if in a brightly lit room; the audience remains in darkness, witnesses to an ordered field. Before moving, he takes his pulse — a simple, empirical act that carries the modern condition: the self as self-measurer. His heartbeat establishes the initial tempo of the music and the movement.

His dance begins in this inner rhythm, but as he crosses the measured space, the geometry begins to act upon him. The sculptural nodes tug at his movement; his tempo shifts as he nears or leaves them. The body that began as self-contained is gradually drawn into relation. Midway through, he pauses, takes his pulse again, and begins to reposition the sculptural elements. Each new configuration reshapes the web of forces around him. Music responds live to his tempo and gesture, following rather than leading — a sound that breathes through the dancer’s evolving rhythm.

The dancer’s heartbeat, symbol of interiority, becomes an instrument through which the world’s proportions are measured and restored.

Second Movement — The Interior Field

As the dancer exits, the lights fade. The bright, even illumination of the first section gives way to shadow. The second movement begins in darkness, sound, and projected light. The sculptural objects, still in their final configuration, now serve as surfaces for moving images — abstractions whose substrate is archival footage, functioning as a palimpsest analogous to the geometry of the first section. Faces, gestures, and glimpses of the human past shimmer across the balsa surfaces, dissolving into texture and color. The sound deepens, surrounding the audience in an immersive, interior atmosphere.

The audience, still in darkness, becomes aware of their own inner seeing. Yet the imagery refuses pure subjectivity — what we call inner life is built from the residues of the world, from the memory of the living cosmos refracted through media, thought, and history. The inner as the world turned inside-out.

Third Movement — Axis and Arc

A twilight light rises. The audience becomes faintly visible for the first time, while the dancer reenters the stage. The sculptural objects remain as projection surfaces, their imagery fading to ghostly residue. Moving slowly, the dancer begins to reposition the objects once more — not to correct the geometry but to listen to it, to restore alignment through care and responsiveness. The live sound follows each adjustment, expanding and contracting like breath.

The lighting gradually extends beyond the stage, softly illuminating the audience. The distinction between viewer and performer dissolves into shared twilight. Facing the audience, the dancer slows to stillness. He takes one long, audible breath — in through the nose, out through the mouth — in sync with the final tones of the music.

Then, stepping calmly off the taped geometry, he crosses the boundary that once measured him and walks into the same light that now includes everyone present.

The geometry remains, faint and golden, as the sound fades to silence.

Trace Reverb Trace is an installation with sound, realized on Governors Island, NYC during the 2024 Indeterminacy Festival. The project was created during our artist residency on the island and assisted by 4 emerging and 9 apprentice artists.

Sited in an abandoned home at 17 Nolan Park, and in acknowledgement of the technological history and largely built nature of Governors Island, Trace Reverb Trace envisions a self-sustaining artificial ecology independently reclaiming this built environment when the people have gone.

The sound was based on a 10 note scale (A Dekany derived from the research of Erv Wilson) whose root tone was the resonant frequency of the rooms where each array was installed. Each of the 42 speakers functioned independently and “chose” a pitch from the scale, an amplitude level, and duration based on environmental factors.

Artists Jonah Bowrie and Ben Munoz, who were Emerging artists in this year’s festival and assisted us on our project, have an ongoing online work at https://fuit.es. Ben and Jonah incorporated content from Trace Reverb Trace into fuit.es. The page is here: https://fuit.es/trace-retrace and continues to grow and change in digital space.

Our emerging and apprentice artists:
Derek Holland, Noelle Salaun, Jane Grabowski, Jonah Bowrie, Ben Munoz, Sam Douma, Brayden Carr, Daniela Chapparo, Elliot Russell, Jude Markey-Smith, Trey Scantlen, Ben Zucker, and Thelonius Garcia.

This project was made possible by the generous support of the New York Arts Program (Emilie Clark, Director), and Stanzi Vaubel, Artistic Director and Founder of the Indeterminacy Festival.

Images: Bjorn Bolinder
@findthelightphotography IG
findthelightphotography.com