The Black Scholar Journal of Black Studies and Research ISSN: 0006-4246 (Print) 2162-5387 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtbs20 Stumbling into Place Tara Aisha Willis To cite this article: Tara Aisha Willis (2016) Stumbling into Place, The Black Scholar, 46:1, 4-14, DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2015.1119620 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2015.1119620 Published online: 03 Feb 2016. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rtbs20 Download by: [New York University] Date: 04 February 2016, At: 07:37 Stumbling into Place revives his body at once, keeping on through both actions. His presence is simul- ’ Seeing Blackness in David Thomson s taneously insistent and indistinct, allowing Choreographies of Ambiguity audience eyes to wander, only to be com- pelled back to watch when small pattern TARA AISHA WILLIS shifts occur. Dancing at Roulette, a Brooklyn, New York performance space, his becomes a First Moves body in question, a taught perambulation, neither released nor entrapped. What trans- omething happens when a body repeats a forms? What happens through this repetition S movement in time: a settling, a slipping in with constant difference? and out, a loss of trajectory even as the action For a 2012 iteration of the “mantra motion” pushes on. Dance artist David Thomson calls in a different piece titled Hunger, Thomson this repetition the activation of a “different appears nude. The audience gathers around engine,” as the “simplicity of keeping going” a nondescript corner inside Judson Memorial becomes a transformative force.1 In making Church’s meeting room-turned-performance his work, Stumbling Towards Babylon … space in New York’s Greenwich Village. In (2011), Thomson stumbled upon what he a darkness lit by a lone lamp, Thomson’s calls the “mantra motion,” an action at once physical circumnavigations begin. His long, laborious, meditative, and powerfully desta- black body looms along with its own bilizing to his body in its repetitive execution. shadows, vulnerably submerged in the Pulsating his chest and torso in sequence, he motion, falling in and out of the light. His lets his breath—painfully audible—carry the blackness and its shadow become strangely cavity of his arched-back torso through a cir- part of the movement and its socioaesthetic cular motion over his planted legs. He drops particularity. Performing in a back corner his spine back and rebounds toward the top under the balcony of the church, just outside of each circle, keeping his balance, but the wide, vaulted architecture of the main barely. Eyes closed, sweat and spit flying space, his swooning, swooping figure along his orbit, his knees buckle, feet becomes an intersection of histories and ques- stumble, arms alternate between dangling, tions. Judson Church was the site of early post- Downloaded by [New York University] at 07:37 04 February 2016 flailing, and gently resting on his chest. As modern dance experimentation by the artists minutes of repetition pass, the exactitude of of Judson Dance Theater (JDT) in the early these gestures crumbles as we gathered audi- 1960s; this iconic space holds a history ence watch. The circles lose consistency of largely populated by white bodies. The spec- speed and shape, intensifying through the ters of the “neutral doer” and liberated, demo- build-up of repetitions over time. He seems cratized body often called up in dance suspended in the cycle, a puppet dangling discourse alongside JDT are amongst the from a point on his chest or abdomen, but pro- ghosts lingering around Thomson’s perform- foundly in control, pushing further into the ance. “Judson” as a discursive, canonical hypnotic rhythm. Thomson depletes and monolith often stands in colloquially for © 2016 The Black World Foundation The Black Scholar 2016 Vol. 46, No. 1, 4–14, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2015.1119620 Figure 1: Okwui Okpokwasili and David Thomson in the corner of Judson Memorial Church perform Thomson’s Hunger. Movement Research at the Judson Church, New York, 2012. © Ian Douglas. postmodern or experimental dance-making particular relation of body to space and approaches.2 Other specters in the room call sight: as film theorist Kara Keeling observes, such notions of neutral, free, equalized Fanon is always “precluded by his percepti- bodies into question: the many iterations of ble ‘blackness’ because past images, the phrase “black dance,” both as proudly stories, and the like constantly overwhelm borne affiliation and too-easily appointed perceptions of his present.”4 The “white label to which broad ranges of work have world” bids him act within the frame for been reduced in historiography and criticism, blackness it has itself created, imprinting a 3 Downloaded by [New York University] at 07:37 04 February 2016 also hover nearby. Thomson’s reordering of fixed history upon Fanon’sbody,which the performance space’s usual usage aligns exists literally within the eye: the white with the many dance experimentations that viewing-point becoming a terrain requiring have taken place in the church over the certain survival tactics.5 Within the eye’s years. But now, his black body navigates an spatial character, his location becomes a always already simultaneously aesthetic and question—his body a “problem” and a ques- sociopolitical terrain, vacillating between tion mark. To watch Thomson’s “mantra shadow and light, exposure and obscurity. motion” is to watch a black body navigate Frantz Fanon offers a mode of understand- a state of uncertainty. His circulating body ing black subjects in motion that relies on a is what Fred Moten might call an “ongoing Tara Aisha Willis 5 event of an antiorigin and an anteorigin, Frames replay and reverb of an impossible natal occasion […] the reproduction of blackness Up the stairs, a dancer rolls along a wall. ’ in and as (the) reproduction of black per- Museum-goers steps slow, to cast hesitant formance(s) […] casting off effect and affect glances at the unusual sight in the Marron ’ in the widest possible angle of dispersion.”6 Atrium of New York s Museum of Modern This ongoing event, paradoxically durational Art. A group of dancers, including David and singular, is a reconstruction and decon- Thomson, wind and weave in colorful street ’ struction of the body, a production and a clothes throughout the audience s scattered flinging into dispersion of what ontology uncertainty, deep in the alert reverie of their itself might entail, and for Moten, a space bodily investigations. Further into a gallery, in which blackness is performed; perform- a physical center of the performance ance is black; black performance is. becomes temporarily clear: women in a Perhaps ambiguity, in which Thomson’s circle wear black leotards and tights, standing moving figure is hyper-presenced but circu- simply, present. They occasionally walk out lating constantly out of focus, is the kind of of formation, circling in a line to land in new space where unexpected logics can undo spatial arrangements. Much of the audience our assumptions about singular, stable iden- follows, filling in around the dancers in tities. Thomson forms an arch in the air that black despite their stillness. But the shift of unravels and returns, apparently caught, the audience creates new open spaces, but also offering something else—what he unused ground becomes available to the calls the motion’s transformative power: its brightly costumed improvisers, and frames ability to produce ambiguity, blurring Thom- are restructured, making their movement son’s experience of the task with our watch- newly visible to and through the audience, ing. He makes of himself a kinetic even if that audience isn’t always looking. materialization, persisting within the para- The circled dancers are white; those moving doxical position of his black dancing body, more freely through the space, black. White looping it through sociopolitical, dance-his- choreographer Deborah Hay has created 8 torical, and aesthetic fields of vision. Thom- this dance Blues, in response to the Some son’s mantra motion is not an emblem of sweet day series curator Ralph Lemon’s Downloaded by [New York University] at 07:37 04 February 2016 larger racial systems at play in the dance prompt for his commissioned artists to field, rather those societal mobilizations “grapple with notions of black music.” Hay echo within the poetics and performativity divided her cast into two groups based on of Thomson’s choreography. His body in her perception of skin color—the “blue action draws our attention to dance’sdiscur- whites” and “blue blacks.”9 Hay later sive categories and racial blindspots, and explained this decision as an aesthetic facilitates our viewing of the works them- choice made after she visited the Atrium selves: the body of language around the with Lemon and noticed the striking contrast body in question; dance that kinetically the- of his dark skin against the white walls. orizes the “position of the unthought.”7 Hay’s charged casting, along with performer 6 TBS • Volume 46 • Number 1 • Spring 2016 frustrations around the racial, political, and not what we look at itself, but what we see economic implications of the piece, pushed when we look. At what point in attending to Hay, Lemon, and their collaborators into a our perceptual processes do we cease to complicated public conversation.10