René Highway’s Dance Legacy Through a Decolonial Lens

Abstract

This paper examines René Highway’s "Prism, Mirror, Lens" (1989) through an evolving creative process that shifted from plans for live, land-based choreography to an archival, layered, and speculative practice. Highway’s choreography troubles dominant readings of queerness not through overt representation, but through abstraction, fractured narrative, and refusal of easy interpretation. Working with degraded VHS footage, phytograms, and experimental layering, the project reframed editing as choreography, composing rhythm, dissonance, and layered perception from archival materials. Interviews with Highway’s collaborators activated memory as embodied knowledge, extending the work beyond the stage. Engaging with absence, distortion, and fragmented archives revealed that knowledge can emerge from flicker, multiplicity, and refusal of singular meaning. In this way, "Prism, Mirror, Lens" and the resulting film insist on queerness as method—holding space for speculative survival and positioning Indigenous performance as a site of both cultural continuity and futurist possibility.