Rehearsals for a Time Undone explores restagings through theatrical and performative modalities, speech acts, and active readings of archival documents, forging connections and solidarities across spatiotemporal distance. Conjuring what is now a dream of bodies in space together, the exhibition presents episodes of the choreopolitical, asking, after Hannah Arendt, how we move politically, and how such movements, conditioned by the disciplinary constraints of the archive and the dance step, might produce an improvisatory excess. A provisional stage, on which might be glimpsed new formations of the social carrying the charge of latent political knowledge, passed on through gesture and generation. 

The works in this exhibition tighten the fabric of memory; trace the diasporic, cultural migration of movement, people, and forms; and reinvest the present with the promise of counter-hegemonic activist practices. Khalili looks to theater-makers in austerity-era Greece as they reenact the oral storytelling of North African migrant labor activists in 1970s Paris. McClodden undertakes an autoethnographic study of the disappearing Black Philadelphian dance the Philly Bop. Restrepo reenacts segments from the script of a lost Colombian adaptation of West Side Story, exploring the cultural transmission and racial politics of both the film and salsa dance. Kiswanson centers the figure of the child as bearer of knowledge as he studies in the archives of postcolonial theorist Edward Said.