t wasn’t until the seismic sensor that she decided to make the technology a part of her being. When determining which sense to stitch to her body, earthquakes seemed an obvious choice for the choreographer. “When you think about dance, you think about movement. Then you realize that not only humans move, there are lots of things moving,” Ribas explains. “The planet moves constantly: not only rotates, but also shakes. It shakes everything, and constantly. That’s powerful.” Similarly, the chip in her elbow is also constantly active, responding with vibration to seismic readings regardless of whether or not she’s performing. If there happens to be an earthquake while she’s talking to someone, she might pause for a moment. Ribas laughs about this, saying, “Earth keeps interrupting my daily life! It’s a nice feeling.” She has paused multiple times during our conversation, and I wonder how many were because of earthquakes.
Waiting for Earthquakes has thus developed into an expository portrayal of the living earth, during which Ribas uses the artificial mechanism in order to amplify the natural world. When performing, Ribas says that she feels as though she is in dialogue with the planet—the earth, she says, decides “when,” and Ribas decides “how.” In a way, she plays a conduit through which the planet can say, “I’m here and I’m active.” It’s strange to think that it’s necessary to anthropomorphize Earth in order to understand it. Yet Ribas notes that we consider earthquakes a sort of personified evil that acts beyond our control, when in all actuality, they are quite organic and rather unaligned with our human philosophies of good versus evil.