About DDB
Distributed Dance Body is a collective of three left-handed strangers from different walks of life who met virtually at the 4th Psychogeography Congress in 2020. Our goal is to reclaim dance floors from distracted elbow-swinging and polite conversation and convert them into arenas where forgotten primordial languages are spoken. We are discussing ideas and planning for a post-pandemic reopening of the clubs, and we currently welcome new members.
The Folks
Elia Rita is a Spanish artist researching movement and quietude. Currently, she is nurturing her walking-centered practice by learning extensive shepherding, where daily walks actively contribute to the recovery of rural territory and preservation of peripheric ways of life and knowledge.
In 2020 she created the digital archive of the 4th World Congress of Psychogeography, and received a grant from the Centre del Carme Cultura Contemporània to facilitate visual and live art workshops for people at risk of exclusion. Between 2017 and 2019 she wrote for Art Practical, completed a curatorial internship at the Media and Performance department at MoMA and a development & fundraising internship at Southern Exposure. As many other fellow art-related practitioners, she’s a moonlighter too.
Jody Oberfelder has created a vast array of performance works and films. which explore a myriad of presentational formats. Her goal is to expand the scope of how one experiences dance, surprising audiences by taking them on a journey through theatrical environs, historical habitats, or ordinary places. Her immersive body trilogy: 4Chambers, The Brain Piece, Madame Ovary were performed on Governors Island in an historic house, New York Live Arts, and the Flea Theater. In May 2021 the company will perform in the prestigious Dance Munich Festival “Walking to Present and a seven-person version of Life Traveler, a pop-up piece performed in public space, provoking pause in the midst of everyday life so as to contemplate intimate journeys. Her athletic and visually tantalizing pieces include a solo concert at PS 122, and company works: Tangram 2004, Moved, Social Dances , The Story Thus Far, The Title Comes Last, Approaching Climax, Dido & Aeneas 2008, Soldier’s Tale, Kurt Weill’s Zaubernacht, and Castle Walk, a danced-through tour of a Baroque Palace in Portugal. Oberfelder has performed the works of Phyllis Lamhut, Meredith Monk and Ping Chong, Asad Raza (Whitney Biennial 2017), Steve Paxton (MoMA 2012) and Simone Forti (MoMA: Judson Church: The Work is Never Done) 2018-2019, and Sheryl Oring (Brooklyn Public Library 2020). Jody Oberfelder Projects impact the field by taking traditional notions of choreography and using them to create worlds where everyone is a participant.
Stefano Cossu built and used many pinhole cameras, wrote an unpublished tour diary of Los Angeles dance clubs, organized theater workshops in occupied Palestine, photographed wild rabbits at night in Chicago, raised money for a monument to Adolf Wölfli by gambling, raised an Invisible Hen in Stuttgart, and wrote poetry in terza rima and limericks on a couch from the Salvation Army. He currently engineers information systems for cultural heritage organizations, practices Judo, is drawing his own mind map, and doesn’t know where to go next.