What sets my choreographic practice in motion are sets of questions regarding embodiment and what it means to be considered more or less than human. Blackness has been un-thought within the European philosophical canon, yet it haunts modernity. My work touches upon the contours of this problem in the form of representation (and its limits) within the frame of theater or within performance, to challenge that which renders certain bodies obsolete, illegible, disruptive, or disposable. I work from the excesses of meaning, the excesses of the flesh, the excesses of embodiment in and through feeling, a humble attempt to step to the side of Eurocentric views that trap blackness in reductive logics within representation. Thinkers that inspire such questions and explorations in my practice include Denise Ferreira da Silva, Hortense Spillers, Dixa Ramirez D’Oleo, Fred Moten, Rizvana Bradley, Mlondi Zondi, David Marriott, Saidiya Hartman, Tina Campt, Sarah Lewis-Cappellari... among others.
“... it’s the unsung that makes the song. . .” – N. H. Pritchard, “Hue: Blue”
My way of working with(in) the limits of representation is through dynamic and visceral forms of image-making. In my work it is that, which is also (un)seen, that makes the scene. Through a personalized notion of fugitivity, a will to escape reductive logics of meaning-making within the frame of theater and within performance, I develop formal exercises that escape Eurocentric logics of representation that have rendered my body illegible. I approach this illegibility through nonsense and playfulness. The knowing eye and the knowing I have (from a Western perspective) created an impasse from which I move sideways, a humble attempt at reducing the violence of sight while also constructing a possibility to exist in an otherwise fleshy space where no-thingness can rest quietly, unencumbered by a need to affirm anything. So, every performance I create is an experiment in fugitive aesthetics.
The etymology of theater is from Theatron—"a seeing place," which I came to learn by way of dance theorist Bojana Cvejić. The question of seeing and being seen is integral to my work, however, animated by the sonic and haptic possibilities made available to bodies through performance. So in my work, I include the horror and pain that sight has created in a past that seems to never pass for racialized subjects. In this matrix of entangled seeing, "me seeing you seeing me"—performer to spectator and back towards performer and amongst performers—I point toward other possibilities of being with and for one another, in and through affective relations that don't occlude historical violence but, through sliding, dancing, falling, touching, breathing, become a movement toward a formlessness that invites the indeterminacy of play, however temporary this might be. From (t)here, I try to access a poetics of pre-literal matter, its affective charge in its fleshy viscerality, and the abyssal thinking required to remain in this endless spiral that is in a motion of continuous departure, flight.
So, I keep practicing. I keep dancing myself into an amalgam of sensual materialities and listen so that each choreography is suggestive of this incomplete motion in the process of its endless unfolding.