Jonathan González and Angelique Rosales Salgado for Swerve Fatigue

ANGELIQUE ROSALES SALGADO: jonathan ﹏﹏﹏﹏ , .ᐟ ⸝⸝

JONATHAN GONZÁLEZ: angelique !!!

ARS: how are you thinking about landscape , black life , and pastoralism ( or intervening on the pastoral “ canon “ in art history ) through Swerve Fatigue ? can you talk about the meteorological pulse or tether that is present in the work ?

JG: i’m thinking about landscape less as a stable ground and more as a condition of relation–something continuously made and unmade through movement, weather, and perception. the pastoral, in this sense, is not a site of retreat but a constructed fiction that has historically excluded black life while extracting from it by insisting upon black fungibility as inanimacy of the fog, the boulder, and the like, prioritizing the verticality of a foregrounded fantasy of the euro-american, white subject. Swerve Fatigue intervenes by leaning into these fraught figurative conditions of blackness fomented in vocabulary of the pastoral, or nature in general, by seeking to become this atmospheric condition—its pressure system.

the meteorological pulse in the work is both literal and affective: shifts in light, heat, density, and sound that register as shifting conditions of the loft as weather moving through the body. the performers track these micro-climates through variable negotiations of groupings always in relation to the passage of the sun on and in the vanishing point. similarly, i am surfacing the motif of meteorological events in nineteenth-century american landscape painting to their historical significance as an artistic response to fears of black reconstructionism and, in particular, the Haitian revolt. in this way, the circumstance of events like meteor showers, tumultuous storms, dense overcast, and celestial auroras are in themselves artifacts of black assembly and insurgency in the euro-american psyche.

ARS: over the past three weeks in your residency at the kitchen i’ve felt the architecture of the loft take new shape , like the space was awaiting the arrival of your practice . when i think of your idea of the swerve it stirs up the words / verbs “ swarm “ and “ deviance “ too . the psychic space of the swerve escaping the enclosures of white supremacy and swarming it , encircling it , and subtly rupturing it into this affective rapture that intervenes on social negotiations .

you’ve spoken about mapping out these spirals in the choreography , these formations that think through the form of an ensemble or even orienting the body through multiple lateral horizons . you describe it as something akin to electrovalence . can you talk about your study of affect theory , dancing , and neuroscience and how you are scaling these different perceptions of time , flesh , and touch to blackness and performance , and the notion of the individual ?

JG: i think of the swerve in relation to scholarship of erin manning, adrienne edwards, and the early physicist like lucretius who sought to problematize the individuation of the atom towards choreographies of atomic deviation that gather force through repetition, and speak to more nuanced methods of forming linkages. the swerve is something that begins as a minor adjustment and accumulates into a collective condition. the spiral structures in the choreography are not only spatial but perceptual, asking the performers and audiences to orient across multiple lateral horizons at once, rather than toward a single frontal axis. this produces a field where attention disperses and re-collects, on different terms, where no one body holds the center for long.

electrovalence names a kind of relational charge, how bodies come into proximity, exchange intensity, and modulate one another without needing direct contact. this is where my interests in affect theory and neuroscience meet dancing, in thinking about how sensation precedes cognition, how touch can circulate before it is registered, how time can dilate or compress depending on collective attunement and the capacity for a moment to hold the desires of a group.

blackness, for me, is operating here as infrastructural. it organizes perception, the theatrical elements, the relationship to sound, to site, to memory cultures, rather than a fixed identity. blackness, in this formulation that exceeds the flesh and enters into the onto-epistemological arenas of the human, liveliness, and death as ongoing hauntologies. this orientation towards the infrastructural role of blackness has the capacity to reorganize relations and unsettle the boundary of the individual. this work leans into that instability, where the self is continually distributed across others, across space, across the duration of the event, without settling into the frame.

ARS: there is this recurring provocation of the feeling or space “ between life and death “ in your staging of swerve fatigue here , provoked by the intensifying theatrical ecology you’ve set into the dramaturgy of the work : lighting , sound and voice , atmosphere , touch . the way light moves between the hour of 7p and 8p in the loft is so dramatic , and you’ve arranged these frequencies distinctly into it , turning the space into what feels like this sort of infernal heaven . distinctions between dusk ≠ sunrise collapse , the columns turn into these angelic pillar points , the perspective of the room is so unsettled that foreground / background become ubiquitous , heat and haze and sweat combine and fill the air , the two subwoofers immerse us in pressure , the registers of touch are expanded and prolonged .

it just occurred to me , moriah’s ( evans ) life / dance / death venn diagram ! [1]

in chasing these permutations through language together in rehearsal , we’ve thrown around this feeling of “ the first time “ … of when things feel or sound like the first time . [ i recall a moment where marguerite in your performance together at ccs bard called full tilt asked in this improvisatory way into the mic “ … do you remember the first time you felt touch … ? “ ] [2] we’ve shared conversations these past few weeks over hannah black’s essay magical first equipment for kandis williams’s exhibition at 52 walker, A Line. she writes : “ dance is the most ephemeral of the arts because the human body is the most ephemeral of media . “ [3]

in many ways there is no real measure of containing or capturing this feeling , but rather its somewhere to make fantasy from ( an intuition ) , and in performance its presence holds a sense of futurity that can renew again and again . how does this feeling tug at notions of intimacy and embodiment in your practice as a choreographer and writer , and in Swerve Fatigue ?

JG: i’m interested in that space between life and death, death and life, as a durational condition rather than a fixed threshold, something that lingers and stretches across the event. moriah evans’s diagram is a key touchstone here, where life and death remain distinct yet meet in that shared zone called dance. the work leans into that overlap, and traverses the divide, not to resolve it but to stay inside its tension, where movement holds both vitality and disappearance at once, where the memory cultures of these units—black life, land, inanimacy, the collective form—are cast on lateral planes to be in correspondence.

the theatrical elements are not there to illustrate this but to thicken it, to make it palpable through shifts in light, sound, pressure, and atmosphere. as the sun moves through the loft, time begins to fold, sexual cultures of the pier emerge and dissipate, representations of emergence and grief share the same space, so that dusk and arrival, ending and beginning, co-exist within the same perceptual field.

the idea of “the first time” sits inside this fold. thinking with hannah black, i’m aware of how systems like notation have historically tried to fix and capture movement in the service of legibility and productivity. against that, or adjacent to it, i’m drawn to the somatic to train how sensations can resist capture in order to re-enchant the capaciousness of feeling in the field of relations as if for the first time even as we carry the historical residue and temporal gravity.

intimacy, then, is not about securing closeness but about remaining available to that instability when our touch meets. embodiment here becomes a site of return without resolution, where touch, sound, light, and haze can be encountered again, differently, without being fully known.

ARS: there is long history of speculative and experimental firsts at the kitchen , too … a few dear artists whose works we’ve spent time with together in the archive , along with your own participation in the kitchen’s dance and process series in 2023 at arts + letters .

any archival “ record “ of performance is unruly and slippery , disrupting what is seen / unseen tied to site and memory , but how do you think about lineage ( and lore ) ? alongside your ideas of deindividuation , improvisation , and the recent continuum of works you’ve created that “ seek to challenge the illusion of the autonomous individual ” ?

to the point of material and the archive , and your relationship to image-making and the moving image in a cinematic sense , you are also creating a Swerve Fatigue film , shot here in the loft in 16mm with rudy gerson . there’s talk of releasing the score as an album …

JG: spending time in the archive with you, encountering works by ralph lemon, sarah michelson, trajal harrell, ishmael houston-jones and fred holland, greg tate, bill t. jones and arnie zane, i kept returning to the feeling of witnessing something at the edge of its making. there is a kind of bareness in those loft works, a diy insistence, where choreography is not stabilized but tested in real time. what stayed with me was that sense of first encounter, seeing artists i deeply respect moving through ideas without guarantee, committed to the form on terms that exceed notation or fixed capture.

lineage, for me, moves through that kind of encounter. it is less about inheritance and more about proximity to a set of conditions, a shared devotion to making under uncertainty. lore builds in the gaps, in what cannot be fully held by documentation, in what circulates through memory, anecdote, and embodied transmission.

the archive is valuable to me precisely because it is incomplete. it can only retain a trace, a partial sense of the material, never the full density of the event. working with rudy gerson on the 16mm film is a way of staying with that tension. the analog image carries grain, delay, a kind of temporal thickness that resonates with the loft’s conditions and the labor of making work there. it does not resolve the problem of capture but leans into it.

the album functions similarly. the soundscape that geng and alexis are producing is central to the work’s architecture, and releasing it extends that field into another form. both the film and the album are not documents in a strict sense but parallel articulations, ways the work continues to move without settling into a single record.

ARS: in her 2017 essay swerve for lyle ashton harris’s book Today i shall judge nothing that occurs , adrienne edwards writes about seeing black queerness in harris’s images and portraits as a “ mode , means , and matter of the contingent as it concerns swerving slippages of space , time , and gender . “ moreover what i like that she terms as “ black-queer voids-in-formation […] ” and she does name the gay club ( where some of harris’s images are made ) as but one manifestation . [4]

how we’ve discussed this text together gets at ideas of contingency , of sensation , of accumulation , of the erotic , of preservation , of stretching an ecstatic moment beyond linear time and testing how far it can go … in particular stretching an ecstatic moment where song and body meet and merge . how do the fissures of gay ( night ) life figure into the work ?

JG: our discussions on adrienne edwards’ writing on the swerve, through lyle ashton harris’s photographs, has been a grounding point for me. the writing and the images both inhabit and exceed the canon of critical reflection and portraiture, holding form while spilling beyond it. what edwards names in the swerve is something almost imperceptible, a slight deviation that becomes a governing condition for queer survival, a way of moving within and against constraint at once. that sensibility is deeply germane to this work.

the fissures of gay nightlife enter from there, as spaces where that deviation is lived and sustained. i was intentional in working with alexis and geng because both are embedded in queer nightlife and experimental music cultures, where sound organizes relations differently, outside of fixed identity or stable ground.

there are moments that attend directly to the subwoofer and bass as a kind of primal scene, where vibration catalyzes entanglement. that low frequency space gathers bodies through shared sensation. the queer scene of the club becomes a source of inspiration as a condition where a queer commons can form through negotiations of rhythm, desire, and duration. queerness, here, is always under development, continually forming in response to conditions that do not carry it forward. it builds its own collectivities and transits through selected kin. within the work, intimacy moves across the group rather than settling into pairs, opening other configurations of attachment and desire that are held collectively over time.

ARS: in your practice i find a distinct relationship between your theoretical and choreographic inquiries to sound and black music in particular , to voice , to the remix , and the excessive sonic loop . in swerve fatigue , with alexis , GENG , and wayne ( with whom you each have collaborated with over many years ) , you are entangling a history of european opera to a contemporary history of R&B and the female voice , where these two geographically oriented song practices collide against each other . through it you , alexis , and geng compose this sonic velocity that quickens and builds and unleashes into the space throughout the hour , and carries so much physicality in the way you , AJ , india , ananda , marguerite , and kingsley take it up or in somatically together .

can you talk about the score , and your intrigue in merging and blurring these two genres ( live ) the question of analog vs . electronic / post-produced ? how you are also experimenting with the idea of the ear worm in pop music ? ( ﹏﹏﹏﹏ , .ᐟ ⸝⸝ kelhani : “ i'll let your body decide if this is good enough for you … " )

JG: i’ve been thinking with alexander ghedi weheliye around how both analog and digital sound technologies are deeply shaped through relations to black vocality, and in particular how black femme voices have been central to the engineering of recording practices. the voice is not just content but a structuring force, something that has calibrated microphones, compression, reverb, and the architecture of the studio itself. that lineage sits inside the score.

bringing european romanticist opera arias into proximity with contemporary r&b is less about fusion and more about pressure, allowing these vocal traditions to rub against each other, to reveal their different investments in projection, intimacy, discipline, and excess. with alexis, geng, and wayne, the score becomes a live system that builds, releases, and circulates energy through the space, something the performers take up somatically rather than interpret from a distance.

i’m also drawn to the earworm, to the loop, the chorus, the verse as both a technological current and an extractive device. a song like kehlani’s “folded” moves through the social field with an intensity i genuinely love, but that circulation is also tied to a libidinal economy that detaches the voice from the body in the production of popularity. we’re trying to stay inside that tension, to stretch and repeat without fully resolving, to let the loop become something felt collectively rather than consumed.

the question of analog and electronic sound sits there as well, not as opposites but as layered conditions. the live voice carries friction, breath, and contingency, while post-production extends, multiplies, and displaces it. the score moves across those registers, holding the instability between presence and mediation as a generative space.

ARS: your work(s) are often shaped through prolonged , recurring collaboration . Swerve Fatigue (2024–) is an ongoing project that has unfolded across several iterations , preceding this 2026 presentation at the kitchen .[5]

here , you put forward fatigue as an entangled and enabling condition or force to surrender to , through which you are reorienting the idea of endurance within the work . not necessarily by pushing one’s body to its limit but rather about passing endurance to one another , in thrall to commitment . the durational pursuit of it becomes cumulative in the body ( these nuances do exceed the performance space ) and i see it really being about a refusal of or reframing of loss .

closely together with the entire ensemble , how are you uniquely developing how endurance transmutes collectively and through each of your practice’s meeting each other ?

… is devotion [ an endless rehearsal ] ?

i also see this :

ARS: in her 2017 essay swerve for lyle ashton harris’s book Today i shall judge nothing that occurs , adrienne edwards writes about seeing black queerness in harris’s images and portraits as a “ mode , means , and matter of the contingent as it concerns swerving slippages of space , time , and gender . “ moreover what i like that she terms as “ black-queer voids-in-formation […] ” and she does name the gay club ( where some of harris’s images are made ) as but one manifestation . [4]

how we’ve discussed this text together gets at ideas of contingency , of sensation , of accumulation , of the erotic , of preservation , of stretching an ecstatic moment beyond linear time and testing how far it can go … in particular stretching an ecstatic moment where song and body meet and merge . how do the fissures of gay ( night ) life figure into the work ?

JG: our discussions on adrienne edwards’ writing on the swerve, through lyle ashton harris’s photographs, has been a grounding point for me. the writing and the images both inhabit and exceed the canon of critical reflection and portraiture, holding form while spilling beyond it. what edwards names in the swerve is something almost imperceptible, a slight deviation that becomes a governing condition for queer survival, a way of moving within and against constraint at once. that sensibility is deeply germane to this work.

the fissures of gay nightlife enter from there, as spaces where that deviation is lived and sustained. i was intentional in working with alexis and geng because both are embedded in queer nightlife and experimental music cultures, where sound organizes relations differently, outside of fixed identity or stable ground.

there are moments that attend directly to the subwoofer and bass as a kind of primal scene, where vibration catalyzes entanglement. that low frequency space gathers bodies through shared sensation. the queer scene of the club becomes a source of inspiration as a condition where a queer commons can form through negotiations of rhythm, desire, and duration. queerness, here, is always under development, continually forming in response to conditions that do not carry it forward. it builds its own collectivities and transits through selected kin. within the work, intimacy moves across the group rather than settling into pairs, opening other configurations of attachment and desire that are held collectively over time.

ARS: in your practice i find a distinct relationship between your theoretical and choreographic inquiries to sound and black music in particular , to voice , to the remix , and the excessive sonic loop . in swerve fatigue , with alexis , GENG , and wayne ( with whom you each have collaborated with over many years ) , you are entangling a history of european opera to a contemporary history of R&B and the female voice , where these two geographically oriented song practices collide against each other . through it you , alexis , and geng compose this sonic velocity that quickens and builds and unleashes into the space throughout the hour , and carries so much physicality in the way you , AJ , india , ananda , marguerite , and kingsley take it up or in somatically together .

can you talk about the score , and your intrigue in merging and blurring these two genres ( live ) the question of analog vs . electronic / post-produced ? how you are also experimenting with the idea of the ear worm in pop music ? ( ﹏﹏﹏﹏ , .ᐟ ⸝⸝ kelhani : “ i'll let your body decide if this is good enough for you … " )

JG: i’ve been thinking with alexander ghedi weheliye around how both analog and digital sound technologies are deeply shaped through relations to black vocality, and in particular how black femme voices have been central to the engineering of recording practices. the voice is not just content but a structuring force, something that has calibrated microphones, compression, reverb, and the architecture of the studio itself. that lineage sits inside the score.

bringing european romanticist opera arias into proximity with contemporary r&b is less about fusion and more about pressure, allowing these vocal traditions to rub against each other, to reveal their different investments in projection, intimacy, discipline, and excess. with alexis, geng, and wayne, the score becomes a live system that builds, releases, and circulates energy through the space, something the performers take up somatically rather than interpret from a distance.

i’m also drawn to the earworm, to the loop, the chorus, the verse as both a technological current and an extractive device. a song like kehlani’s “folded” moves through the social field with an intensity i genuinely love, but that circulation is also tied to a libidinal economy that detaches the voice from the body in the production of popularity. we’re trying to stay inside that tension, to stretch and repeat without fully resolving, to let the loop become something felt collectively rather than consumed.

the question of analog and electronic sound sits there as well, not as opposites but as layered conditions. the live voice carries friction, breath, and contingency, while post-production extends, multiplies, and displaces it. the score moves across those registers, holding the instability between presence and mediation as a generative space.

ARS: your work(s) are often shaped through prolonged , recurring collaboration . Swerve Fatigue (2024–) is an ongoing project that has unfolded across several iterations , preceding this 2026 presentation at the kitchen .[5]

here , you put forward fatigue as an entangled and enabling condition or force to surrender to , through which you are reorienting the idea of endurance within the work . not necessarily by pushing one’s body to its limit but rather about passing endurance to one another , in thrall to commitment . the durational pursuit of it becomes cumulative in the body ( these nuances do exceed the performance space ) and i see it really being about a refusal of or reframing of loss .__

closely together with the entire ensemble , how are you uniquely developing how endurance transmutes collectively and through each of your practice’s meeting each other ?

… is devotion [ an endless rehearsal ] ?

i also see this :

Bio

Jonathan González is a choreographer, artist, and writer whose interdisciplinary practice investigates how movement operates as a form of spatial, aesthetic, and cultural inquiry. Working across choreography, installation, sound, image, and text, González approaches performance as a mode of research—one that attends to site, sensation, memory, and embodied perception as critical materials. Their work often unfolds through durational, site-responsive formats that foreground collective processes, attention, and the politics of presence. González’s artistic projects have been presented in museums, performance spaces, and public contexts, and are frequently developed through extended collaboration with dancers, sound artists, and curators. Recent and forthcoming projects include Swerve Fatigue, a large-scale ensemble work developed with The Kitchen; new commissions for the 2026 Whitney Biennial and the 59th Carnegie International; and magic hour–golden time, a durational performance exploring landscape, framing, and atmospheric perception.

Alongside their performance practice, González writes across theoretical, poetic, and critical forms. They are the author of Ways to Move: Black Insurgent Grammars (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025), a book that extends choreographic thinking into prose and experimental writing, engaging Black studies, aesthetics, phenomenology, and performance theory.

González is a 2025 Pew Fellow and currently serves as Assistant Professor in the Department of Dance at Hunter College (CUNY), where their teaching and research bridge embodied methods, performance studies, and interdisciplinary inquiry.