Grain Elevator Project
Cincinnati, OH
June 2009
In early June of 2009, Ethan Philbrick and I embarked on a journey to create a dance piece at a half-demolished grain elevator along the Mill Creek Valley in Cincinnati, OH. I first visited this structure in 2004 as an urban explorer, fascinated Cincinnati’s post-industrial wastelands of lower Price Hill and Fairmount, where the ominous structure resides. It was because of this abandoned place that I skipped numerous classes to explore its caverns, remnants detailing past uses as a business, a squatter den, graffiti artists’ canvas and rodents stomping ground, and heights accessible via steel supports with questionable architectural soundness. Years later, the start of a great friendship occurred on the top of this structure amidst the city haze, trains’ song, and setting sun. It was at this moment I declared, “I want to dance here.”
Years later, only half of the building remains. The belt I used to jump on, pulled taut high above the silos, now hangs loosely from the top of the building flapping against the hollowed out side. Where a magical kiss occurred, no longer accessible. The graffiti is gone. The rodent shit is gone. Something far worse in smell, perhaps human excrement, is in its place. I had the worst scare of my life in this building nearly 4 years ago. What breath I could exhale quiveredwith such uncertainty it frightened me further. Somehow the space seems even more terrifying now, dying a slow death of a life that will not be forgotten as it was never known to begin with. Perhaps that is what makes this space so sacred to me. Through dancing in the space I am not simply breathing new life into a lifeless space, but communicating the life that already exists and has been muted.
The photographs below (thanks to the wonderful photographer David DeWitt) are the start of an ongoing project of moving through and negotiating the grain elevator space. The final product(s) of this project is still unknown.
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