My Drowning Looks like Dancing is a performance work by Cuban Brazilian artist Renata Pereira Lima. The piece takes place in TOGETHER for its inaugural edition during Miami Art Week 2021 at the Seven Seas Motel in the historic corridor of Biscayne Boulevard.


Folklorists draw from American Indian, Central Asian, and Indian mythology to speak of earth diver, a character or deity who presents itself usually in the form of an animal. The earth diver, who is sent by a creator, plunges to the seabed through a primordial ocean to bring up sand or mud which, in turn, transforms our world. 


My Drowning Looks like Dancing explores the concept of dualism and how contrary forces may be complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world; a demonstration of how these forces may give rise to each other and interrelate to one another. What may be holy to one, is marked sinful to another — distinctions which are commonly understood, yet arbitrary nonetheless. 


The piece employs dance, soil, a sprinkler, running water from a hose, and a score of urinary sounds to uncover the false lines we cleave through the intrinsic, reciprocating oneness of our world and our appetite for partition: Heaven’s mud laps the earth.


My Drowning Looks like Dancing is made by Renata Pereira Lima in collaboration with writer Addison Bale, and sculptor and co-composer of the sound score, Oshay Green.

29 NOV, 2021

RENATA PEREIRA LIMA IN COLLABORATION WITH ADDISON BALE AND OSHAY GREEN

Renata Pereira Lima is a Cuban/Brazilian choreographer whose practice explores the body as a vessel of reactionary and archivable phenomena through dance performances, gestures, in-situ investigations, performance, and video-making.