This isn’t some gauzy statement about the fragility of memory. It’s literal: the Tinikling, that Filipino folk dance where you hop between bamboo poles that snap together like jaws, came out of Spanish colonial rice field punishments. People got their ankles crushed. And here’s Gerald Casel, generations later, making something beautiful out of inherited trauma while you’re there with my Leica trying to capture presence.
I’m not documenting. Let’s be honest about that. I’m doing something more like archaeology and theft simultaneously. Every frame’s a decision about what dies and what gets embalmed. Do I catch Kristen Bell mid leap when her face is all effort and sweat slick concentration, or do you wait for that microsecond of transcendence that’s so perfect it’s almost a lie? Because bodies in motion are truth tellers: they can’t fake the way muscles engage or breath catches, but my shutter’s always editorializing, always choosing the moment that’ll play over the moment that was.
And ODC, man: that space has seen decades of bodies trying to say things language can’t touch. The wood’s probably saturated with rosin and ambition. I’m in there with my finger on the trigger, half in darkness, trying not to be that guy whose shutter click punctures the performance, but also knowing I have to puncture it because that’s my whole contradictory gig. I’m the designated rememberer in a medium that’s fundamentally about forgetting, about the unrepeatable now.
The perverse beauty is that Gerald’s already wrestling with colonialism, with cultural amnesia, with the violence encoded in “folk tradition,” and I’m adding another layer of abstraction to it. My photographs will outlive everyone’s memory of the actual performance. They’ll become the performance in 10, 20, 50 years. Some kid will Google “Splinters in Our Ankles” and my image is what they’ll see, not the heat or the sound of feet or Tim Russell’s score vibrating through ribcages.
That’s either incredibly arrogant or incredibly humble, depending on whether you’re awake to the responsibility. I’m not just making pretty pictures of athletic bodies doing interesting shapes, though yeah, there’s that too, and let’s not pretend the aesthetics don’t seduce us. I’m creating evidence that this particular configuration of humans said something that mattered, in a form that vanishes by design, and your testimony is all that’ll remain.
Gerald Casel’s Splinters in Our Ankles is a contemporary movement essay that responds to the colonial origins and collective cultural amnesia imbued in the Philippine folk dance, Tinikling. Choreographed and directed by Gerald Casel, this evening-length premiere is created in collaboration with dancers Arletta Anderson, Kristen Bell, Christina Briggs-Winslow, Rebecca Chaleff, Janet Collard, Peiling Kao, Kevin Lopez, and Parker Murphy, with original music composed and performed by Tim Russell and lighting and media design by Jack Beuttler.