The defining and presentation of self has been one of the most important pre-occupations for people of African descent. In this talk, performance scholar Nadine George-Graves looks to artists who take up these questions in particularly unapologetic forms, which illuminate an identitarian “luxury” not often afforded Black folk. In other words, these artists don’t seem particularly invested in a Du Boisian double consciousness, or a mission of racial uplift. Rather, their aesthetic foundations are not easily understood from the “usual” stories of Blackness. They take up performance spaces in ways that, she argues, indicate a profound shift in the relationship between Blackness and artistry. It is not a coincidence that dance and movement artists create this phenomenological affective response. Movement artists understand in unique ways how much is born on the body, written on the body, redeemed through the body, and healed through the body.

At the root of these performances is what the scholar describes as a “luxury” less present in earlier generations. Luxury does not necessarily mean something taken for granted. Will Blackness ever be able to take anything for granted? This is also not about a freedom from oppression or a retreat to meaningless abstraction. Rather, what George-Graves finds luxurious in and about these performances is the active and assumptive release from the stories we are “supposed” to tell of ourselves. When more of our stories are performed, not only is a more accurate picture of a people painted, but also more of us can imagine and make manifest abounding Black ontologies. This feels like a luxury, especially for a people never meant to survive in the diaspora.

The event will open with a short guest performance by dancer-choreographer Oxana Chi, with live-music (saxophone and loops) by musician and interdisciplinary scholar Layla Zami, who will also give a short contextualizing input. Corpuscular Cores is dedicated to the legacy of late African-American composer and musician Julius Eastman. The performance was created in response to a graphic score by Romi Morrison, as a commissioned work for The Kitchen New York as part of the 2023 L.A.B. Research Residency x Simons Foundation x School for Poetic Computation.

The session will close with a conversation between Nadine George-Graves, Layla Zami and Oxana Chi, moderated by Dr. Anne Potjans.

This event is made possible through a cooperation with Freie Universität Berlin, the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft and the Collaborative Research Center "Intervening Arts" (CRC 1512). With special thanks to Prof. Dr. Doris Kolesch.

Nadine George-Graves is the Naomi Willie Pollard Professor at Northwestern University where she chaired the Department of Performance Studies and has a joint appointment in the Department of Theatre. She also serves as Executive Co-editor of Dance Research Journal. Her work is situated at the intersections of African American studies, critical gender studies, performance studies, theater history, and dance history. She is the author of monographs on The Whitman Sisters and Urban Bush Women, as well as numerous articles on African American performance. She is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater, a collection of border-crossing scholarship on embodiment and theatricality. She has given talks, led community engagement projects, and has served on many boards and committees. She is a past-president of the Congress on Research in Dance (CORD). George-Graves is also an artist, and her creative work is part and parcel of her research. She is an adapter, director and dance theater maker. Her recent creative projects include Architectura, a dance theater piece about the ways we build our lives and Suzan-Lori Parks’ Anansi The Story King and Sugar, a digital humanities project at the nexus of creativity and scholarship.

Oxana Chi is a dancer, choreographer, curator, educator, and trendsetter. Her work explores how our present is built upon in/visible remnants from the past, and its porous relation to our futures. Her rich repertoire comprises commissioned works for Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Leo Baeck Institute — New York | Berlin and The Kitchen. Her international tour history includes venues such as Volksbühne Berlin, HAU, Societätstheater Dresden, Abrons Arts Center, Movement Research at Judson Church, Delhi International Queer Theatre & Film Festival, as well as many universities across the globe. She was a keynote performer at the Black German Heritage & Research Association (University of Toronto, 2018). Honors and awards include: Performance Studies International Award (2023), Ambassador of Peace DOSHIMA Jakarta (2016), Abrons Arts Center AIRspace Grant (2017-2018) and being listed in The Dance Enthusiast’s A to Z of People Who Power the Dance World (2018). Chi was a Curator for the International Human Rights Art Festival in Manhattan and she initiated the TANZnews series at the Werkstatt der Kulturen in Berlin. She co-chaired the international symposium-festival Moving Memory (TU Berlin, 2016). Chi was a guest teaching artist in the Dance Department at New York University, and currently teaches choreography in the dance studies graduate program at Freie Universität Berlin.

Layla Zami is an interdisciplinary academic and artist whose work orbits around the nexus of cultural memory, corporeality, performance, diaspora, language, and spacetime. She is currently Postdoctoral Researcher in Performance Studies at the Collaborative Research Center Intervenierende Künste at Freie Universität Berlin, and a Lecturer at New York University, Berlin program. Zami was Visiting Assistant Professor and Adjunct Associate Professor at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, where she co-chaired Black Lives Matter at Pratt. Her first monograph, Contemporary PerforMemory: Dancing Through Space Time, Historical Trauma, and Diaspora in the 21st Century received an Honorable Mention from the Oscar G. Brockett Prize for Dance Research (2023). The book was based on her dissertation completed at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (ZtG), where she also obtained a teaching award (Fakultätspreis für gute Lehre). Keynotes include HKW (2023) and Society of Caribbean Research (2022). As a Resident Artist with Oxana Chi Dance & Art, Zami creates and performs music, sounds, spoken words and physical theater. The duo gratefully and gracefully performed and presented across the globe.