It is a complex subject, with as many complicating factors as changes of angle that the border takes from east to west.  From animal migrations to the travel patterns of the Tohono O'odam nation (through which our national boarder cut), from issues about drug transportation, finding migrant and non-migrant work, lives lost in the desert heat, nationalist sentiments, to rivers, shared lakes and canyons that make a simple wall an unsimple idea... as an artist I am more intertested in seeing past the yes-or-no answers that divide us.  In this piece I present photos and images from the border, movements of the people who are crossing the border for their various reasons, and sounds from various leaders and groups who purport their particular point of view.  Ultimately, this dance is an expression of feeling of being caught in these images.

 

El Muro's early performances were an initial experiment for me, before I had yet to possess projection-mapping software, of how to project images on an ever-changing landscape of brick-like boxes, that become alternately a desert landscape, a prison cell, columns of an ancient building, or the bricks of the great wall itself.  While I've incorporated video and slide imagery in my work since 1987's Judgments, the last ten years my work has been devoted to looking at ways of getting out of the video box: how to incorporate video that is not just a distracting rectangle above the dancers, but is in effect another character, set piece, or dancer on stage too, in three-dimensional way.