The artistic spaces that once housed me hurt me, causing tremendous trauma. This project—the second installment of “soft bodies in hard places,” “very peak summer solstice”—was a haven.
There is a general consensus that this moment can’t restore power to a people who aren’t in the room. But perhaps it can deflate the confidence of a narrative that props up those in power?
Two pieces that delve into ideas surrounding worship and identity: Angie Pittman’s “Came Up in a Lonely Castle” and Johnnie Cruise Mercer/TheREDProjectNYC’s “Process memoir 4: The word, the spirit, and Little Rock.”
Dan Safer is the devil you’ve been dying to dance with and Ae Andrea’s enviable lines and swag make them an optimal fiend friend for that card.
Ni’Ja Whitson queers divine kingdoms with cosmological meetings amidst a swirl of lineage, legacies and streaming star scapes. Salve.
After over a decade hiatus in making work, with “now my hand is ready for my heart” downtown icon, Nicky Paraiso gushes forth while looking back on several lived lives in Nickyworld.
John Gutierrez writes from inside “This Bridge Called My Ass” from Miguel Gutierrez
And, yet, we are here, re-fashioning community and remaining soft in a building of stone. The monuments are crumbling. We can take an ax to their base or let them dissolve to the dust of their origin story.
Considerations of how to communicate certain ideas, evoke abstract affects, and share stories explicitly offer possibilities for shared dialogue.
Here, thoughts are freed from linearity or reasonable binds. There, processing systems allow the universe to expand and retract as an infinite sponge. Where bodies transmute from human familiars to alien exotica.
mayfield brooks, jumatatu m. poe, and the I Moving Lab are part of aa three-week series conceived and curated by Marýa Wethers at Gibney Dance highlighted “intersections and crossroads among Blackness, queerness, and Indigeneity.”
As a central point of exploration: “Spaces are not exterior to our bodies, instead, spaces are like a second skin, they unfold in the folds of the body.”