What seems motionless, Waits: Silvina López Medin weaves poetry, memory and Isadora Duncan’s legacy

Poet Silvina López Medin brings together poetry, archival research and personal history in What Seems Motionless, Waits, a performance that interweaves fragments of Isadora Duncan’s family story with her own through spoken word, photographs, videos and archival materials.

Drawing on López Medin’s research in the Duncan collections at the Croton Historical Society and the New York Library for the Performing Arts, the work follows the lives of the Duncan family, who envisioned the space that today houses the Duncan Dance Research Center in Athens and established a dance school in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, where López Medin now lives.

By weaving these historical narratives together with her own family archive, López Medin explores the intersections of personal and collective memory, movement, migration and lineage. The performance ultimately asks how inherited narratives can be reimagined, bringing to the forefront the stories of women who have long remained at the margins of history.

About the artists

Silvina López Medin is a poet, playwright, translator and editor born in Buenos Aires and based in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. She is the author of five poetry collections, including La noche de los bueyes (Loewe Foundation International Young Poetry Prize), 62 brazadas (City of Buenos Aires Poetry Prize) and Poem That Never Ends (Essay Press Book Award). Her play Exactamente bajo el sol, staged at Teatro del Pueblo in Buenos Aires, received the National Playwriting Third Prize from the Argentine Institute of Theatre.

López Medin has translated Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet into Spanish and Sergio Chejfec’s The Month of the Flies into English. Her writing has appeared in or been reviewed by Ploughshares, Hyperallergic, the Poetry Foundation, MoMA/post and Harvard Review, among others. She is an editor at Ugly Duckling Presse and teaches creative writing at New York University, Pratt Institute and Columbia University. In March 2027, she will present What Seems Motionless, Waits at Dia Chelsea in New York.

Vivi Tellas is an Argentine theatre director and curator whose work has had a profound impact on the international performing arts landscape. She is the creator of Biodrama, the influential theatre project centred on staged biographies, through which she has explored new forms of documentary and autobiographical performance. Tellas was appointed Belknap Fellow by the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University in 2014 and served as artistic director and curator of Princeton Live Art Sessions in 2017. Her productions have been presented internationally in cities including New York, London, Vancouver, São Paulo and Barcelona. She has been recognised by the Buenos Aires City Legislature as an Outstanding Cultural Figure and currently serves as Director of the Live Arts School at the National University of Tres de Febrero (UNTREF).