nialoveDance

Drawing from the research tools set forth by historian Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation,” a writing methodology combining historical research with critical theory and fictional narrative to make sense of the gaps in the archive of transatlantic slavery, I extend this method into multimedia performance. Beginning in 2013 with a collaboration with female farmers and dancers in Tanzania titled S(oil), g1(host) has undergone several iterations. That starting point explored the cultivation of land and the intimacies between ecology and black life. A May 2016 performance at Snug Harbor, NY, evoked the geography of the New World plantation as staging area for genres of fugitive escape and the economies of movement and narrative within confinement. In April 2017, a staging at Theater For the New City (NYC) featured an engagement with the thought presented in Christina Sharpe’s groundbreaking text, In The Wake: On Blackness and Being. Sharpe’s powerful notions of “wake work” as the necessary reckoning with the deathworlds that structure black life, serves as a further impetus to this project. In this iteration, the re-telling of childhood stories and memories of my late father propelled me to excavate my relationship to water and the histories it holds. This led me to a more direct encounter with the ocean and the remnants of the Middle Passage. In June 2018, I acquired my deep sea diving license and traveled to Tobago to do free dives, which were filmed underwater. These arduous descents recalled the experience of drowning slaves, who were thrown or jumped overboard, while also pulling me into an oceanic realm which intensely disoriented my bodily instincts. Here, I revisit Sharpe, who speaks of the “residence time” of the ocean as the life cycle of the elements cast into its waters. The sodium of human blood, for instance, has a residence time of 260 million years. Being submerged in the density of these ungraspable sediments and encountering the shimmer of life and death requires a rigorous attunement of my attention. In g1(host), we enter into this residence time and let it shape and change our sensorium, as we seek clues of the continuum between past disaster and present possibility.