The Hold is also an Embrace: Readings in Contemporary Black Feminist Performance

Abstract

My dissertation centers contemporary Black feminist dance theater to rethink the relationship between performativity and Black liberation. Through close readings of Nelisiwe Xaba’s Fremde Tanze (“Strange and Foreign Dances”) (2017), Leslie Parker’s Bone Woman Traces in Black (2018), Crystals, Smoke and Spirits (2019) and A Call to Remember (2020), and mayfield brooks’ Dancing in the Hold (2018), this ethnographic research highlights the performance work of Black women and Black non-binary artists whose work circulates between the Midwest and Eastern Coasts of the United States, South Africa, Germany, and The Netherlands. My methodology blends critical theory, ethnographic documentation, and creative narrative as a fusion of my sensorial experiences within these performance spaces. I show how choreographic structures erected within Black feminist performance are rooted in the rich artistic, spiritual, and cosmological anchorings of moment and sound practices in the African Diaspora. I illustrate how each artist elucidates distinct forms of Black expressivity and how the aesthetic structures of each work tether these performances to their larger geopolitical contexts of anti-Blackness and contemporary movements for Black Liberation. The interruptive capacities of this performance respond to the ways in which anti-Blackness attempts to contain and capture Black life. I conceptualize these strategies as each artist’s “interruptive capacity” – that is, the ways in which Black feminist performance strategically interrupts how Blackness, and quotidian representations of Blackness, become anchored in abjection. In this way, I show how Black feminist dance theater is a primary, not auxiliary, force in contemporary movements for Black liberation. Across the dissertation, I map this idea of interruptive capacity onto each artists’ work in order to highlight the unique visions and refusals that Black performance concertizes.