On the Floor marks the first collaboration between Théophylle Dcx and Maria Silk. In this duet, these two friends attempt to piece together traces of 70s and 80s queer San Francisco. Specifically, their project explores the legacies carried by dance music genres of the late 70s and 80s (especially disco and hi-NRG) in relation to the early days of the HIV/AIDS crisis. The piece weaves together the links between nightlife, the virus, and queer memory, drawing on materials gathered throughout Dcx and Silk’s research: interviews with DJs and clubgoers, Patrick Cowley’s music and personal diaries, live recordings of Sylvester, practices like flagging and fan dancing, and ephemera from clubs like the I-Beam and the Trocadero Transfer. Working in relation to this archive, Dcx and Silk push themselves into altered states induced by dance, moving through an inner space of hedonism, exhaustion, escape, and discipline.

Choreography and Performance: Théophylle Dcx and Maria Silk
Music: Izaak Schlossman 
Dramaturgical Assistance: Kim Ip and Marion Parigi 
Lighting Design: gg torres (San Francisco) and Andrew Odom (LA)
Production: DIZZYING

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On the Floor has been supported by the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, Flourish Trust, and The Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry’s Psychedelics in Society and Culture fellowship program; the Kenneth Rainin Foundation’s New and Experimental Works (NEW) program; the Zellerbach Family Foundation’s Community Arts program; CounterPulse’s Edge Residency program; as well as residencies at Actoral and the Ballet National de Marseille.

Théophylle Dcx lives and works in Marseille. His practice is akin to a personal diary. Biographical, youthful, and resolutely memorial, it hyperbolically shares anger, fatigue, anxiety, joy, desires, and hopes in the face of a perpetually collapsing world. Social, political, and medical catastrophes punctuate the narrative. His work treats the body as an archive and an embodied political gesture, on which appear the ebb and flow of history, the stakes of social struggles and the need for emancipation from contemporary normative regimes. His work has been presented at Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Datsuijo (Tokyo), CounterPulse (San Francisco), Art-O-Rama (Marseille), and Théâtre Saint Gervais (Geneva).

Maria Silk is an artist based in San Francisco. Centered on performance, her practice examines themes of collectivity and friction within queer and trans life as well as received narratives around queer history and identity. Her work draws on over a decade of activity as a drag queen and DJ in San Francisco’s queer nightlife. Silk’s work has been exhibited and performed at Bay Area venues including the Berkeley Art Museum, the Cantor Center for the Arts, CounterPulse, Slash, and Southern Exposure, and internationally at Fierce! Festival (Birmingham, UK), and Improspekcije (Zagreb, Croatia).

Performance organized by Keko Jackson and produced with the help of clara lópez menéndez