VALERIE OBERLEITHNER
artist choreographer | movement director | coach

Posse Comitatus is a collaboration between Chelsea Knight and Mark Tribe, two artists whose work has explored the intersection of performance and politics. They made contact with an upstate New York militia that was part of a civil society network of autonomous paramilitary groups created in the United States in the mid-1990s. The group allowed the artists to film training exercises where they demonstrated various firing positions and formations. Posse Comitatus is a Latin term meaning "force of the country", and conveys the idea that citizens have the inalienable right to defend themselves against tyranny, even if that means taking up arms against the state. For this new iteration of Posse Comitatus Tribe and Knight have collaborated with choreographer Valerie Oberleithner to develop a performance and video installation that focuses on parallels between militia exercises and the choreographic process, particularly centred on the idea of the rehearsal.
A pre-performance that disciplines the body by preparing and arranging it, and is employed in both dance and military training. The rehearsal has an exclusive relationship with time: it relates to the future, not the past. The performance exposes the thin border that exists between the fictional battlefield and the real scene, and their inter - changeability.