Withness, without us
We had seasons, festivals, and tours, we had work days and evening performances and opening and wrap parties. If something fell off pace, it merely got left behind. See you next cycle, try to catch up. What happened once we all disappeared together?
The last performance I saw/managed before The Kitchen closed to the public was an open secret. The worst kept secret. Ralph Lemon staged the third iteration of his Rant performances as part of Okwui Okpokwasili and Judy Hussie-Taylor’s curated series for Danspace Project. It was a secret because the audience was meant to consciously be there. Someone wanted you there; maybe it was Ralph or another performer, maybe it was The Kitchen or Danspace. Kevin Beasley created the booming soundtrack through his own sound system that provided much more power than a small black box theater needs. Ralph, Okwui, and Samita Sinha’s voices reached over the beats. Dwayne Brown, Mariama Noguera-Devers, Stanley Gambucci, and Paul Hamilton danced in unison, and Darrell Jones stepped out from his seat in the audience for a solo. The air was humid with sweat, and the performance was followed by a lot of hugging. I was closing down the building so I let everyone linger afterwards for as long as they wanted. There was time, people didn’t feel in a rush that night. A few months later, Ralph wrote briefly on the work for MoMA’s website and lamented the luck of this occurring before we all scuttled into our apartments and hid away. Why was this particular, not quite public/not quite private performance blessed by timing, and not others? There is no trace of this performance on our website, where so much performance is now presented, because it was a secret. It was made to remain within our bodies. We didn’t know that many other future performances would be erased, but in another way, and would have to live on in our imaginary.
Rant is an iterative score filled with expressions of rage and freedom, created by Black and Brown artists in a dark space within an institution. There’s accumulation, but no peak. (Maybe it’s all peak.) I’m reading Tara’s score of performance notes as a gathering of past shared moments. We’ve fallen out of time for months now. If we can’t even remember what day it is, how can we share time? Conjuring the past has been such a comfort.
It can feel like it’s only grief and rage that bring us together now, not in the darkness of the black box, but in the hot summer sun and on our small screens that will contain us for a long while. We’ve been with ourselves for many months now. Without our routines, we can often feel like our bodies are these emptied theaters. We’re not useful. We’re not housing the senses and the other bodies that fill us up. But as Tara writes, “change is only legible in relation.” If it wasn’t clear before, universal grief doesn’t exist. Universal rage doesn’t exist. We’re beside ourselves right now. Togetherness needs to remain relative.