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Showdown 2026

Showdown is an annual Boston College tradition featuring performances by each of the University’s 17 dance clubs.

Before the Melt

This work explores snow as a form of archive, a material that records, stores, and eventually releases information over time. When snow falls, it conceals the existing landscape beneath a uniform surface while simultaneously becoming a recording medium itself. Wind, human action, and debris each leave physical impressions on the snow's surface. These marks remain long after the forces that created them have passed, functioning as a record of activity and presence. 

However, this archive is not static. As temperatures shift across hours and days, the surface degrades and melts away. Objects that were buried begin to re-emerge, and the landscape enters a new phase of complexity, no longer a clean record, but one in which multiple layers of time are legible at once. This process makes snow a uniquely temporal archive. Unlike stone or paper, it has a fixed lifespan determined entirely by climate. The same conditions that allow it to preserve are also what guarantee its eventual disappearance. The work is interested in this connection between storage and loss, and what it means to document something that is itself fading.