Refining Tangibleness
(Work-in-Progress)
collaboration with videographer Alex Munro
Supported by the Baryshnikov Arts Center Residency
Refining Tangibleness is a multidisciplinary performance work created by choreographer and performer Chaery Moon in collaboration with videographer Alex Munro, supported by the Baryshnikov Arts Center’s Artists Residency. Rooted in Buddhist concepts of impermanence (anicca) and the 49-day mourning ritual, the project investigates how the body holds memory, how it releases it, and how emotional states shift across time.
The work is shaped by Chaery’s experience of losing her loved one and participating in the traditional 7-days × 7-weeks × 49-days ceremonies. In the studio, these rituals become a framework for exploring transformation—how gestures fade and return, how repetition becomes a form of prayer, and how stillness reveals the subtle oscillations of grief, tenderness, and release.
Central to the collaboration is a dynamic interplay between live performance and real-time videography. Munro captures Chaery’s movement as it unfolds, generating layered digital projections that reveal multiple temporalities simultaneously. The space becomes an immersive environment where the body is mirrored, refracted, and multiplied—an ephemeral archive in motion. Audiences witness both the immediate physical movement and its evolving digital afterimage, inviting reflection on what lingers and what dissolves.
Supported by BAC’s resources and development space, Refining Tangibleness expands into a meditative encounter with presence, absence, memory, and transformation. Through the merging of dance, light, and live video, the work offers a quiet but potent contemplation of how we navigate loss and how movement can make the intangible visible.
Photographed by Maria Baranova
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