Black Dance Stories is exactly what it sounds like and precisely what we need right now. It’s a distillation of insightful moments in post-performance talkbacks spliced with casual conversations you once shared over drinks, plus powerful sentiments you’re overhearing now at BLM protests.
Molly Lieber + Eleanor Smith X Tara Sheena
Bobbi Jene Smith X Benedict Nguyen
7 Names: Everett Saunders + Marjani Forté-Saunders X Benedict Nguyen
Ella Rothschild X Melissa Levin
This body unfurls in slow motion, leaving ample space for labels, classifications, and archetypes to land upon her and vanish.
I start to explain something about artistic agency over visual archives of original work but all that comes out is I guess we’re all in trouble.
The work is the group; the group is the work. It is an antidote to work that devalues the human. The individual is decentralized, but not devalued.
There is no preaching to the choir when it comes to considering reparations, because there is no choir. It’s a lonely act.
They saw, “formalism with flair, and flights of fancy. Quirky, rhythmic, gestural phrases woven into broadly abstract works with exciting choreography. Cute moments that hint at a story.”
Maybe the political statement is that it’s not political. We can exist together, we can live together, without it being some message or some signpost in the sand, some marker of who you are.
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.