Papa, Romeo, Oscar, November, Echo

In the NATO/ICAO phonetic alphabet – widely used in military, aviation, and maritime contexts – Papa, Romeo, Oscar, November, Echo spells out “prone”, a position which involves lying flat on the stomach to offer a stable and accurate rifle shooting position as well as minimizing the shooter’s silhouette. As an adjective in everyday usage, it means “likely or liable to suffer from, do, or experience something unpleasant or regrettable”. 

The work explores tactical language and movement and its interface with the quotidian, in an attempt to destabilize meaning and redeploy its potency to the realm of poetics. Through a series of choreographic scores based on his own arsenal of body memory, Kenneth Constance Loe traverses landscapes and coded speech through camouflaged maneuvers.