DECONSTRUCTION FOR RECONSTRUCTION
Lecture-Performance (in-progress)

Gopalswamy Doraiswamy Naidu (1893-1974) was a prolific engineer of gadgets and businesses, who today could well be dubbed a serial-technologist-entrepreneur. As a young boy he took apart a motorcycle and reassembled it into a fully functioning machine, and in doing so, the autodidact had inadvertently '(re)constructed' the first mechanical automobile outside Europe and North America. This analytical curiosity of his early life, took a curiously inverse turn in his later years when he performatively destroyed some of his inventions in a gesture of political dissent which he provocatively called "construction for destruction".

Imagined as a technology trade fare, this lecture-performance brings choreographic processes of re- and de-construction in dance into conversation with Naidu’s own techno-preneurial gestures. In iterative loops of doing and undoing, on exhibit are personal and public repositories of choreographic technologies, dance workshops and proto-performative sketchbooks that display transdisciplinary and transnational entanglements in the art, science and business of dancing.