The thing about Ghost Architecture: A Palimpsest is that it understood what most commemorative performances miss entirely, that a building isn’t just bricks and sweat stains, it’s every body that ever moved through it, every kid who learned to fail there before learning to fly. Aleta Hayes’ Chocolate Heads took that renovated gym, all shiny and amnesia-bright, and made it remember.
They started in the courtyard making you earn the inside, making you walk the same threshold those dancers and athletes crossed for decades. Then they hit you with layers: contemporary movement bleeding into ghost gestures, stories from teachers who’d aged out, students who’d moved on, all of it happening simultaneously like a radio dial spinning through stations that refuse to die.
This is what renovation doesn’t get, you can’t just slap fresh paint on history and call it progress. Aleta choreographed the argument itself: see these bodies now, but see through them to the bodies before, and the ones before that. A palimpsest of sweat and ambition and the particular loneliness of late night practice sessions when you’re trying to become someone you’re not yet.
The Chocolate Heads made the gym confess. They excavated its memory through movement, turned commemoration into confrontation. Because what’s the point of celebrating a reopening if you’re going to pretend the place was ever really closed? Those walls held everything. Aleta just made the walls speak in the only language that matters, bodies refusing to be forgotten.
A performance installation by Aleta Hayes’s “The Chocolate Heads” that commemorates the reopening of Roble Gym. Starting in the Courtyard before moving into Roble Dance Studio, the performance embraces memories, stories, and movement from former teachers and students, while also revealing simultaneous layers of dance, contemporary movement, and social organization.