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Brief Liberation: Experiments in Black Feminist Embodied Practice (Part of the American Dancing Bodies Symposium
by Dance
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Anna Martine Whitehead and Tara Aisha Willis present embodied assembly and improvisational practices as tools for deliberate indeterminacy and Black feminist sustenance in two movement-driven performances. Each moment is punctuated with live improvised music by Damon Locks—space to process and reflect through practice.
Whitehead shares “assembly,” a movement score from their FORCE! an opera in three acts. Rooted in prisoner solidarity work, queer and femme Black bodies travel an undetermined distance through laborious physical contact, working out the discomforts, joys, and contradictions of embodying Black feminist collective organizing.
Willis describes performing in choreographer Will Rawls and poet Claudia Rankine’s What Remains. Its structured improvisation uses embodied strategies—citational socialities, speculative self-articulation, intra-personal polycentrism—to investigate Black living and lived experience through dynamic collaboration within theatricality’s specular curtailments.
Both presentations are embodied by Whitehead and Willis who perform excerpts of exercises from their respective research, while practicing embodied collaboration. Locks echoes themes of Black collectivity, movement, and care on a sonic register, deploying his archival wandering practice to assemble electronic samples across histories of Black sound and spoken word.
Speakers
Anna Martine Whitehead
Anna Martine Whitehead does performance from the traditional homelands of the Council of the Three Fires, amongst others. Their work considers embodied epistemologies of Black queer time in liminal sites like prisons, attics, and churches. They write about race, gender, and performance; and support coalition movements committed to repair and transformation.
Tara Aisha Willis
Tara Aisha Willis is a dance artist, curator, and scholar who holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from NYU who lectures at the University of Chicago. Select writings appear in The Black Scholar (issue co-editor), Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures (Getty Research Institute/X Artists' Books), and Marking the Occasion (co-editor; Wendy’s Subway).
Damon Locks
Damon Locks is a Chicago-based visual artist, educator, and musician who leads the music group Black Monument Ensemble. He teaches in the Sound Department at SAIC and, since 2014, at Stateville Correctional Center. He received a 3Arts Award, Soros Justice Media Fellowship, and Helen Coburn and Tim Meier Achievement Award.