Sunday, April 13
2:30–4:00 p.m.
Brendan Fernandes’s Moving Through is a site-specific work that will be performed by six dancers at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame. Fernandes intends the work to dissolve the boundaries among visual art, dancers, and audience members. The performance will take place in the Museum atrium and throughout the galleries; visitors can expect to see dancers in the galleries as they respond to a dynamic score composed collaboratively by students. Rather than stage a stationary performance, dancers will move through the Museum, allowing visitors to watch the fluid performance and come and go as they wish.
Notre Dame students who know the Museum intimately through their committed work on the Museum’s Student Programming Committee and in the Gallery Teaching Program will have the opportunity to select works of art to be featured and contribute to the score. These textual prompts—poetic, symbolic, and descriptive—emerging from a collaborative process will transform the dancers' engagement with specific artworks in the Museum’s collection into a Fluxus-inspired happening in a dialogue between text and movement.
As the dancers search for specific works of art, they will progress through the gallery spaces, pausing, interacting, and building relationships with each work of art while using gesture and movement as a form of communication. While certain gestures and phrases are choreographed, the performance remains deeply rooted in improvisation, allowing for a fluid and evolving exchange between dance and art.
The work will unfold as a meditative act, inviting an extended, slow process of looking, sensing, and interpreting. Audience members may come upon a dancer by chance or follow them as they respond to an artwork, thereby transforming observation into an immersive experience.
Though largely silent, the performance will be punctuated by sound. At key points, dancers will gather and play soft ambient or classical music via personal radios and sound devices to create fleeting sonic landscapes. At times, the soundscape will become a cacophony of overlapping tones; at others, a call-and-response dialogue among dancers or a rhythmic interplay of sound will emerge and then disappear as they switch their radios on and off. These auditory moments will animate the space, providing tempo and rhythm for movement.
By integrating movement, stillness, and sonic interplay, Fernandes reimagines the Museum as a living, breathing space where art and dance converge, challenging how we see, experience, and interpret both art forms. The performance will invite audiences into an active, meditative process of seeing, experiencing, and engaging with art in new and transformative ways.
Dancers
Katlin Bourgeois
Hanna DiLorenzo
Princess Gates
Kara Hunsinger
Brian Martinez
Morgan McDaniel
Sound
Claire Staples
Brendan Fernandes is the 2025 artist-in-residence in the Notre Dame Initiative on Race and Resilience. The site-specific commissioned piece Moving Through is made possible through collaboration among, and support from the Initiative on Race and Resilience, the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, and the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art.
Brendan Fernandes (b. 1979, Nairobi, Kenya) is an internationally recognized Canadian artist working at the intersection of dance and visual arts. Rooted in collaboration and fostering solidarity, Fernandes’s projects take hybrid forms to address issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest, and other forms of collective movement. He is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program (2007) and a recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Fellowship (2014). In 2010, he was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award and received a prestigious 2017 Canada Council New Chapters grant. Fernandes is also the recipient of the Platform Award (2024), the Artadia Award (2019), a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2020), and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant (2019). His projects have been shown at the 2019 Whitney Biennial (New York); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York); the Museum of Modern Art (New York); the Getty Museum (Los Angeles); the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa); MAC (Montreal), among a great many others. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University. Fernandes is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago and Susan Inglett Gallery in New York. Recent and upcoming projects include performances and solo presentations at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis), MCA Denver, The Fabric Workshop (Philadelphia), and Prospect 6 (New Orleans).