Set in a post-pandemic New York City, "Every Moment Alters" captures the intense dislocation and unique disquiet that still lingers.
Dancers congregate in a park, languid and incongruous in gold shorts and bright white sneakers. This is a present outside itself: the dancers caught between worlds, yet hampered by both - forced to clamber over roots and branches, their movements hindered, obscured, restricted; to perform before an open-air stage sealed off by metal crash barriers.
There is a collective reminiscence of what was. In the shift back to the studio, past performances flex through the dancers like muscle memory. Alone together, they begin to move, finding release in their bodies and the blank uniformity of a familiar space. But even as they grow more confident, more fluid in their movement, they remain disconnected. The screen splits and fragments, phrases catch and repeat, until one rises high enough from the fractured score to pull the dancers out of the studio and onto a Brooklyn rooftop.
("The ability to forget is actually part of what makes us human...")*
Up here, unfettered by memory, they are released. Their dancing invigorated, communal, powerful. Behind them, the Manhattan skyline, while distant, is plausibly within reach - a promise of all to come. But as the sun sets and catches, flickering back through each location, the mood softens, grows more reflective. The shadow of memory, of how the past is the present and continues to shape the future, lingers on.