Month: October 2019

I spent a long time yesterday reading and re-reading a text shared by choreographer and dancer Malik Nashad Sharpe on their webpage. They write about (their) dance as a practice that slides across the place where hope has been foreclosed but where possible futures still appear. That radical slide between hopelessness and possibility is at play also in Saidiya Hartman’s new book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019), a work about intimate acts of rebellion performed by young black women in U.S. cities at the turn of the twentieth century.

I wondered what it would be like to read back-and-forth between these two texts. Here…

dance is a belief system and choreography is space. these things do not make dreams come true but they are where dreams are made into material texture. performance is fodder for hope and the positing of something else. in defense of marginal and radial practices, choreography that is coy and dysfunctional, a moment where things are not always what they seem. dancing and making it mean something to me, asking something of it. asking it to give me a future if only fleetingly. (Malik Nashad Sharpe)

Wayward, related to the family of words: errant, fugitive, recalcitrant, anarchic, willful, reckless, troublesome, riotous, tumultuous, rebellious and wild. To inhabit the world in ways inimical to those deemed proper and respectable, to be deeply aware of the gulf between where you stayed and how you might live. (Saidiya Hartman, 227)

i’m favouring the complex, the tug and spiral, the working with what is known now and before hierarchies of importance were forged under the influence of others. working with being a faggot, not woman not man, unruly. ordered differently. against an unspoken genocide. working where things are built and fallen, trying to build and falling. giving rise to another possibility, again. (Malik Nashad Sharpe)

Waywardness is a practice of possibility at a time when all roads, except the ones created by smashing out, are foreclosed. It obeys no rules and abides no authorities. It is unrepentant. It traffics in occult visions of other worlds and dreams of a different kind of life. Waywardness is an ongoing exploration of what might be; it is an improvisation with the terms of social existence, when the terms have already been dictated, when there is little room to breathe, when you have been sentenced to a life of servitude, when the house of bondage looms in whatever direction you move. It is the untiring practice of trying to live when you were never meant to survive. (Saidiya Hartman, 228)

willing futurity, the body as a repository for memory. desire. the history lessons that refused to be learnt. Imagination. possibility. maintenance. relief. there is an assumption that those make us powerless and i don’t believe that. do you know what its like to not be made human? i will ensure subjectivity and remake it again and again. that is all. (Malik Nashad Sharpe)

Malik Nashad Sharpe (2019) http://maliknashadsharpe.com/about

Saidiya V. Hartman (2019) Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

Last month, our colleague and friend Sita Balani wrote about her experiences of attending Literature Must Fall, a literary festival held in Birmingham on 28 September 2019. Aimed not at celebrating literature but ‘challenging it head-on’, the festival as Balani describes it has me dreaming about similar gatherings in the field of contemporary dance.

Balani writes:

I took the train to Birmingham for Literature Must Fall, [small in scale] but conceptually ambitious, aiming to dismantle literature rather than hold it up for admiration. […] As co-founder Imandeep Kaur wryly explained, they just get on with doing things, like providing childcare and prayer space, that other people like to theorise about but rarely put into practice.

[…]

The festival itself was unlike any mainstream literary event I’ve ever encountered. There was little distinction between speaker and audience, and the majority of participants were women of colour. Looking at the programme, it seemed to be for people who were critical about the white publishing industry, but just as skeptical about the diversity initiatives that sought to include us. If the implicit rationale of most literature festival turns on the civilizing potential of art, Literature Must Fall asked how writing could help to bring down what passes for civilization. The conversations were expansive and ballsy. There was no grandstanding, no celebrity-worship. Some of the familiar tropes got an airing (the white gaze, exoticisation etc) but even these ideas were given new life in an atmosphere that allowed for genuine disagreement without rancor.

[…]

The day pushed back on the identity talk that characterises much of the diversity discourse, including its intersectional offshoots. Instead, people hunted for new paradigms and thought collectively about the limitations of postcolonial theory, confessional literature, folk stories, narrating our experiences, trauma, and the written word itself.

Sita Balani, ‘Gather’, 26 September 2019, https://medium.com/@balani.sita/gather-cf2c825ac022

Two questions are on my mind:

1. Where in our daily work as artists, producers, scholars, workers in the field of contemporary dance could we take more chances to dismantle dance rather than hold it up for admiration?

2. What kind of festival formats are necessary for swerving the moribund work of diversity initiatives but instead creating the conditions for people to reflect collectively on the limitations of dance as a mode of anti-racist action but also to ask: ‘how dance could help bring down what passes for civilisation’?