Let Go or Be Dragged: A Performance Practice Surrendering to and Exploring States of Loss / Sarah Roush (2025)

This paper details the academic and movement research and development of a performance practice concerned with the portrayal of authentic emotional states, and the subsequent performance output titled Let Go or Be Dragged. Movement research took place over a two-month process of experimentation, improvisation, and feedback exploring a state of loss and creating the performance bearing its pain. The methodologies practice-as-research, autotheory, and autoethnography frame the key elements of living in a state of loss, authentic movement, practices, witness/witnessed frameworks, emotional weight, rituals and repetition, and the felt sense. The concept of body as archive established by Julietta Singh in the key text No Archive Will Restore You bridges the key elements and establishes my body as the origin for my questions, and the main source of information that created my movement practice. Understanding my body as archive, holding both questions and answers that were uncovered through my movement and writing process