REHEARSAL video!

On April 7th I performed a new dance experiment I'm calling "Duration (black people dance better)" for Sophia Cleary's REHEARSAL showing for a small audience in one of those legendary warehouse artist studios in Gowanus. Aside from the chance to perform something I've been thinking about alot lately, I got an hour's worth of great dialogue and feedback based on the Liz Lerman Critical Response Process, as well as dumplings straight from Chinatown and some delightful wine from a giant bottle. The video of my creation for the showing is up!

Duration (black people dance better) from Tara Willis on Vimeo.

Josephine Baker, 18 years old.

If there were ever a body accustomed to having images projected on it, it's hers.

And also...

"As it emerges transformed from this intellectual contact zone, American studies has addressed how collective and impersonal forms of political agency are routinely embodied in propertied, white men, whose political privilege depends on the association of other genders, races, and classes with corporealized identities. The circulation of such 'overembodied' identities as public icons and spectacle has been crucial to the protection of established political privilege." - Eva Cherniavsky, Keywords for American Cultural Studies, ed. Bruce Burgett & Glenn Hendler, 2007

...There is something crucial in this word, "overembodied." Can one ever be too much in their body, too physical, too corporeally defined? Yes, in caricature, in exaggeration, in stereotype. And since the image (all kinds of media, "moving pictures," celebrities on pedestals, etc.) is such a driving force in society, this "overembodiment" of certain identities naturally (perhaps an unhappy choice of words) comes to be expected and assumed (in both senses of the word). As Cherniavsky writes, to reveal and perhaps alter these iconic, corporealized identities, we must examine "the physical body as a social text rather than a given form...there are no bodies without culture, since the body as a kind of material composition requires a cultural grammar of embodiment." Within that format, perhaps, the politically powerful, white men she points to can gain an embodied, socially iconic identity, and those of the marginalized identities won't be hyper-visible, overembodied, too corporeal.

And at the same time, as a mover, a dancer, and dance-maker, why is it a negative to be overembodied? I strive to become more within my body every day as a performer, but to escape stereotypes and expectations that I assume are made every day based on my body and image.

Do these conflict?

On my mind...

"...I will carve black women's bodies and heads

from reddish stone and black stone.

Some will be massive and the work will make me sweat.

The black woman's head is a massive weight.

The black woman's head holds the black woman's brain.

The black woman's body supports the black woman's head.

The black woman's work is the work of this world."

-Elizabeth Alexander

"Slight Rupture"

Some questions that I am tackling in my solo piece (finally) that has a title (finally) thanks to the Schomburg Library uptown. If you haven't visited their Photographs and Prints archive, please do. But come prepared with a random time period or theme you'd like to research (all with the basic premise of "black people," of course), and they will hook you up...

Like the iconic photograph of Gordon, the escaped Mississippi slave who displays his raised whipping scars, his back to the camera, face partially obscured by shadow, the visual image gives us the power to point to our bodies and force the viewer to bear witness. But do we become anonymous by making ourselves into visual symbols of a lived experience? Do we come to harbor in our bodies the stereotypes, assumptions, and interpretations that visual images carry with them? What narratives are lost when only one moment in time is recorded in a photograph? What do we neglect to see and witness when only one part of a body, or a history, is pointed out? In an 1859 slave auction advertisement, a 25 year old woman is described as being “slightly ruptured,” coded language for a body burnt out by repeated childbirth. Do echoes of these “slight ruptures” still remain embedded in our bodies generations later?