Breath-line: movement, breath, and sound: Public dance program by Cat Cruise and Emily Carter, in conjunction with Ode to the Moon.

Breath-Line brings together works by Nancy Ivanhoe and Tia Xia in an exploration of embodiment, emergence, and the invisible forces through which bodies take form.

Drawing on the Daoist concept of ziran (自然), or “self-so-ing,” the exhibition considers the body as porous and continually becoming through material, gravity, memory, atmosphere, and time. Like tides responding to the moon, bodies are shaped by forces that remain unseen. Breath expands and contracts the body; planets move through gravitational relation; materials stretch, gather, erode, and settle.

Like tides responding to the moon, bodies are shaped by forces that may remain unseen. Breath expands and contracts the body from within. Planets move through gravitational relationships. Materials stretch, gather, erode, and settle. Across the exhibition, these movements form a shared language of orbit, rhythm, and transformation.

Ivanhoe’s translucent, suspended forms evoke skin, membranes, nets, and connective tissue, while Xia’s works carry traces of landscape, sediment, bodily memory, and matter in transition. In dialogue, their practices suggest that the body is less a boundary than a field.

In the movement program, dancers enter Ivanhoe’s installation as temporary lines within this field. Breath becomes an invisible form of drawing, and movement emerges through listening rather than fixed choreography. Their gestures echo tides and orbits, revealing the body as both intimate and cosmic: a small system moving within larger fields of gravity, matter, and time.

About the Artists 

Nancy Ivanhoe creates materially sensitive installations that explore permeability, bodily structure, and the fragile systems through which things remain connected. Her suspended and interwoven materials evoke skin, connective tissue, nervous systems, nets, and atmospheric membranes.

Within Breath-Line, Ivanhoe’s work becomes a spatial and bodily field. Its translucent surfaces appear to expand, collapse, and hover between states, suggesting a form that is continually arriving yet never fully fixed. Activated through proximity and movement, the installation reveals the body as something porous: shaped by breath, gravity, and relation.

Tia Xia’s practice considers memory, landscape, material transformation, and the unstable boundaries between body and environment. Her works often hold the feeling of something emerging, dissolving, or returning in another form. 

Like how musical notes flow into space via vibrations and waves, Xia’s work introduces a geological and cosmological sense of time. Body and landscape become intertwined: surfaces recall skin, sediment, water, and planetary terrain. Matter carries traces of its earlier states, suggesting that transformation does not erase the past but folds it into each new form.

Public Programs

Movement Program: Breath-Line

Emily Fluke and Catherine Cruise

July 18, 4 PM

Approximately 30 minutes

Concert

David Ruest and Taro Wayama

August 18, 7:30 PM

Approximately 1 hour