VALIDATION

"Wow, my arms, my forearms got a good work out," Armen exclaims after carrying Janie. As a movement teacher and performance artist, Armen wants to integrate carrying into a dance to explore the relationship of bodies in a contained environment. "I want to actually do dances like that with weight, with somebody on my back. You can really feel how muscles are moving and working… To move as if there was nobody there, but with somebody on me." Janie agrees that an exploration of this relationship is important through both a dance and The 100 Carry Project. "I think it’s really valuable, because we’re – we just seem to be moving in a perverse direction, increasingly perverse, and not just in a physical way, but in our values. I think our values are perverse as a society," she says with a chuckle, unsure if that is the right word. "This kind of work and these thoughts and this kind of conversation and dialogue around these experiences are really important, because they validate sort of our unspoken need, our unrecognized needs to reconnect those things." Janie and Armen share the same principles of devotion and community that The 100 Carry Project cultivates.