ghosts of camille
ghosts of camille is a multi-year project of pateldanceworks inspired by Donna Haraway’s speculative fiction work “The Camille Stories: Children of Compost.” The performance is haunted by the queerness of this imagined otherwise, where our identities as queer artists of color are central to the art and dance we create.
Premiered: July 13, 2024 Yerba Buena Gardens ChoreoFest
Collaborators:
Choreographer:
Bhumi B. Patel
Performers:
Maxine Flasher-Düzgüneş, Korea Venters, Ai Yin Adelski, Rebecca Fitton
Costumes:
Cristina Chavez
pateldanceworks presented ghosts of camille at the Yerba Buena Gardens ChoreoFest 2024. ghosts of camille is a quartet work with PDW company dancers inspired by Donna Haraway’s speculative fiction work “The Camille Stories: Children of Compost.” This story traces five generations of humanoids called Camille from 2025 to 2425, a period in which the human population, having at first risen from eight billion to ten billion, has dropped to three billion and only half of the species alive in 2015 still exist. The performance is haunted by the queerness of this imagined otherwise, where our identities as queer artists of color are central to the art and dance we create. Queerness transcends and encompasses gender and sexuality to embrace being othered. Donna Haraway writes, “Camille is a keeper of memories in the flesh of worlds that may become habitable again. Camille is one of the children of compost who ripen in the earth to say no to the posthuman of every time.”
pateldanceworks will present an expanded version of this piece in December 2025 at ODC Theater.
Funding:
-
Yerba Buena Gardens ChoreoFest
ghosts of camille (excerpt) | july 2024
"Love and rage contained the germs of partial healing even in the face of onrushing destruction."
- "The Camille Stories: Children of Compost," Donna Harraway
"The Children of Compost would not cease the layered, curious practice of becoming-with others for a habitable, flourishing world."
- "The Camille Stories: Children of Compost," Donna Harraway
