In this Field Project, work with two artists of diverse background to create discourse concerned with the b(l)ackgrounds of contemporary performance. Some of the questions we will consider in our work together:
How is contemporary dance indebted to African American structures of feeling?
How is black presence "always already" implicated in contemporary performance?
How do we make space for Black to be a category of rich nuance?
What is queer black social dance? Is it always exotic? Is it always Voguing?
What do Eric Garner’s murder and Michael Brown’s murder and Walter Scott’s murder have to do with making live art in 2015?
Dancers, choreographers, performance makers, curators, and researchers are invited to an intensive week of performance experimentation in dialogue with political perspectives. Studio time includes talking, improvising, making, re-making, and talking again. We will work solo, in duet, and with the whole group. Conversations and creative experiments will explore the tensions and resonance between various approaches (European, African, US American, feminist, queer, postcolonial…) to anti-Black violence, anti-racism, dance histories, African diasporic aesthetics, colonialism, white supremacy, privilege, immigration/citizenship/indigeneity… Alicia Garza says, "If you believe that all lives matter, then you will fight like hell for #BLACKLIVESMATTER." Maybe your dance practice is calling for some reflection and riot, reconsideration and uprising, deeper understanding and direct action.
Keith HennessyThomas F. DeFrantz
