We never practiced our studies and choreographies in front of a mirror. In the beginning, when we started practicing It Is Thus, the accumulation, and the Trisha Brown piece, I always thought looking at myself in the mirror and reflecting on how my movements look would help me better master the dance. Especially with It Is Thus, I would have appreciated looking at how we look while we make the gaze rather than have Trajal comment on the general atmosphere of the group. Also, coming from a pop-dance dominated culture where practice in front of a mirror is emphasized, to dance without a mirror was awkward. Frustrated by the mirrorlessness, I secretly practiced all the moves at night in front of the mirror. Yet, as we started Trisha Brown’s piece on action and reaction and I finally danced with a mirror, I understood why we did not dance in front of a mirror. Dancing in front of a mirror forces the dancer to focus on how the movement looks. As much as it may be an important part of the choreography, the dance that we practiced were more embedded in philosophy that the looks became unimportant. If we were to practice the action, reaction piece in front of a mirror, we would have been obsessed at how our hands and legs move that the dance become mechanical, the opposite of what Ondrej taught us. What is more important in the piece than how it looks is the reactions that our body has to certain actions of our body. To feel this philosophy through our body. I feel practicing without a mirror was more beneficial.

However, as much as the absence of mirrors is important, I felt that there is a particular power in mirrors that make choreography more interesting. Today, working on the archiving project, I organized the four mirrors in a plus sign. Originally, I did not want the mirrors to be mirrors but wanted them to be perceived as simply walls. For that reason, I wanted the mirrored sides to be organized in a circulating pattern so that each quadrant would have a single side of the mirror, repeated orientation decreasing the importance of the mirror altogether. However, when other people helped me set up, the mirrors faced a single direction, so that a quadrant had two mirrors facing in while another quadrant had two mirrors facing out. Unexpectedly, I realized that in this particular orientation, the audience could look at all four mirrors in a single quadrant while not being able to look at all four mirrors in the opposite quadrant making one quadrant bright while the other dark. This intrigued me and made me think about the significance of this orientation within my study of the archive. Eventually, I decided to use the mirrors in the coincidental orientation and use the brightness of each quadrant to lay out the arch of theater – the setting, conflict, climax, and denouement – within the archive. This unanticipated moment of realization of the usage of mirror in performance shaped my study.