Movement II: Half Life (2024) features dancers reenacting movements from Human Measure (2021) amidst the dunes of White Sands National Park, New Mexico—situated near the White Sands Missile Range, the largest military installation in the nation, and close to the Trinity test site, where the first atomic bomb was detonated in 1945.
In reflecting on the intricate relationship between sound, history, and power at this charged locale, Cassils explains: "My sound design serves as a kind of sonic archaeological dig, uncovering the park's layered histories. Overhead, you hear aircraft ranging from a 1945 B-29 Bomber to the whistle of a contemporary F-15 Eagle, evoking the U.S. military's long history of foreign interventions and the rationale for ongoing U.S. support of Israel."Surround sound amplifies the breath of dancing bodies alongside the calls of African oryx, a species of antelope from the Kalahari Desert introduced to the park in the 1960s. The animals’ vocalizations eerily mimic the clicks of Geiger counters that detect plutonium in the surrounding soil, forging a multi-sensory connection to the land's fraught narrative.
Movement II: Half Life silhouettes bodies performing rites of life and death against the shimmering dunes of White Sands National Park
The evaporation of the park’s water tables due to climate disaster has revealed fossilized human footprints that date back 23,000 years, making these tracks among the oldest forensic evidence of humans in the Americas. This confirms Indigenous knowledge that the minerals remember: the land perpetually rewrites itself in the longest act of memory. Cassils’s situating of trans* dancers in this landscape unearths these complex histories of land, place, and population, prompting viewers to interrogate why certain bodies and terrains are protected while others are sacrificed.
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Movement II, (Half Life), 2024
Two-channel film installation with surround sound
13 minutes 5 seconds (looped)
Creator: Cassils
Director: PJ Raval
Producer: Farihah Zaman
Field Producer: Faith Akgun
DP: Amina ZadehFirst
AC: Cory Cave
B Cam Operator: Victor Grossling
Key Grip: Paul Dumond
Grip: Jason Carranza
Sound: Coleen Zickler
Props: Paul DonaldProduction Support: Lauren Badalina
PAs: Ben Quintanar, Mariana Gongore, Juan Pablo Gongora
Choreographer: Jasmine Albuquerque
Performers: B Gosse, Kaydence De Mere, Alucard Mendoza McHaney, Jas Lin, Canyon Carballosa
Sound Design: Kadet Kuhne
Editor: Arshia Fatima Haq
Made with Support from Ford Foundation, OUTsider, University of Toronto, Wilhelm Family Foundation, QUIET, Canada Council for the Arts, Ford Foundation, BARD Center for Human Rights
