Disordering Language: The Poetics of a Body in Movement

In his talk, Cai will describe, and gesticulate towards, a creative process that is intent on developing a Deaf-conscious approach to art making. Rather than build choreography using techniques of dance established by institutions inaccessible to Deaf people, Cai creates with an embodied expression of poetics through the transposition of sign language into movement. Blurring the boundaries between signing, poetry, and physical motion, his work offers an example of how disability and sensory experience can shape new aesthetics of movement and communication. Cai will demonstrate how he has built choreography from the pulse of imagery and feeling without relying on musical input for rhythm. Cai’s creations are a prioritizing of the gestured and the danced word form; moving more deeply into a 3 dimensional language; the signing and signifying body and exploring its potential for new expression.

Cai Glover is a Montreal-based dance artist, choreographer, and artistic director whose work foregrounds the poetics of movement, language, and embodied identity. He has been developing his creative practice for over 25 years, and for more than a decade worked as a performer, interpreter, and choreographer with Cas Public, contributing to multiple company creations before expanding his independent practice. As the founder and artistic force behind A Fichu Turning, Glover explores how language and gesture might be transformed into an embodied movement vocabulary, using the dancing body to probe questions of meaning, perception, and social dynamics. His work investigates the politics of disability, Deaf culture, and sensory experience as sources of artistic poetics and identity. A Deaf artist, hearing differently has shaped both his creative approach and aesthetic voice, giving rise to performances and research that unsettle conventional sensory hierarchies in dance. Over his career, he has worked with a wide range of collaborators and continues to present choreographic work that invites audiences into movement practices at the intersection of expression