Peiling Kao on per[mute]ing

Following are the reflections and questions of dancer and choreographer Peiling Kao, one of ten artists commissioned to respond to Trisha Brown’s Locus by creating new work as part of HMD’s 2016 Bridge Project, “Ten Artists Respond to Locus.” Kao, commissioned by Dohee Lee, created per[mute]ing, which she performed October 14 and 15 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Photo by Margo Moritz of Peiling Kao in per[mute]ing.

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What does it mean to be an Asian dancer trained in Eurocentric dance forms and living in the U.S.? Why is (are) lineage(s) important to dance artists? How do dancers and choreographers relate to lineage differently? What frames an audience’s interpretations of my movement?

I entered Hope Mohr Dance’s 2016 Bridge Project: “Ten Artists Response to Locus” with the admiration of Trisha Brown’s legacy and the intention to learn the entire original Locus. As a professional dancer for over 20 years, I value training, just like athletes practice everyday to keep their bodies in shape. Besides that, I must keep exposing myself to what is contemporary to discover what I need for my current creative practice. Training makes me versatile and I like it. So before I came to the two-week workshop, I planned to create my response after I inhabited Locus, or at least to get a solid grasp of Trisha Brown’s technique. However, the two-week workshop with Diane was not what I expected. Even though we had physical training every day, Diane had bigger goals that required her to pay equal attention to 10 artists in the room from different disciplines. Given these constraints, it was not possible for Diane to teach us the complete dance in the detail that I had expected. I understood and respected what had she needed to do—to share and to explore with all of us. But as a result, during the workshop, my intentions for my response to Locus shifted.

There are rules and physical discipline, or training, within each dance lineage. I think it is important to have specific approaches to training for the purpose of unifying and codifying a movement language. Through these specific physical disciplines, dancers’ movements can make them recognizable as a Graham dancer, Cunningham dancer, or Trisha Brown dancer. I have trained for years intensively in Taiwan in ballet, Graham, Limon, Cunningham, improvisation, Tai-Chi, and Taiwanese/Chinese dance. I deeply connect to these techniques in my body. I appreciate my wide-ranging movement training, which has become my own hybrid physical language. As a dancer, I am grateful for a variety of dance tools, which allow me to be versatile and to have choices.  But as a choreographer, my range of training can be frustrating. With my diverse sources, how can I create movement that is original? Is it possible that I carry so many lineages that I have a hard time finding my authenticity? If lineage is important to dancers, is it as important to choreographers?

During the workshop, I was dealing with my dancer’s mind: just teach me Locus, please! Frustration and impatience hit me and made me question whether I positioned myself as a dancer or choreographer in the project. There were source materials I cared about as a dancer, but not as a choreographer, and vice versa. For example: as a dancer, I cared about the details in the Locus phrasing: what initiates the movement, how to go from point A to point B, what is the quality of the movement.

But these questions were not necessarily important to me as a choreographer tasked with creating a response to the dance. As a choreographer, I found that it was valuable to hear about the historical context of the dance and the personal stories from the time that Trisha created Locus. As a choreographer, I liked to observe Diane, the way she talked, the way she moved and the way she described the quality of the movement. I thought to myself, “She is ‘so Trisha Brown.’” Diane reminded me of the way another teacher from my past, Shelley Senter, talked. Even though Diane and Shelley are very different people, their shared training with Trisha Brown still came through. Sometimes, I was irritated during the workshop and didn’t want to follow Dianne’s directions; at these times, my choreographer’s mind was stronger than my dancer’s mind. I noticed that once I let go of wanting to learn Locus solo as a dancer, I was set free. Having let go of my dancer identity, I felt less frustration. I became careless in a good way: I could simply be there in the workshop without any intention. The workshop with Diane made me realize that I give myself more permission to be in a place of unknowing as a choreographer than as a dancer, at least in the context of relating to a set piece of choreography as opposed to improvisation.

After the workshop in San Francisco, I went back to ‘paradise’, my new home in Hawai’i (where I just moved from the Bay Area). I decided to use Trisha’s sequence of numbers from the Locus score as a tool to create my response. I knew if I tried to address a specific subject through my work, I would get too brainy in the beginning of creative process and I would fail. So I chose to simply follow the task of using Trisha’s sequence of numbers. The first few days in the studio were pretty productive, and then I got heady and tried to edit the choreography every time I started rehearsing. I got stuck at the three-minute mark for a while and hated everything. This self-doubting, over-critical eye and judgment always happen when I look at myself in rehearsal footage with a dancer’s eye. I hated looking at myself and disliked every movement I did.

In the second week in the studio, things totally changed. I started to have fun creating and dealing with numbers even though I made less than 8 minutes of movement in 25 hours of studio time. The piece was not even finished one week before the show opened. But I believed the ending of the piece would come to me when I arrived at the performance space. And it did. Reflecting on this experience, I now realize it is a privilege and a joy to create and to perform my own work, but only when my dancer and choreographer minds work well together.

The title of my piece per[mute]ing describes my creative process. Like Trisha Brown, I made movement variations to ‘indicate’, ‘touch’ or ‘go through’ the points in the imaginary cube. I repeated the Locus number sequence two-and-a-half times. Towards the end of the creative process, I found myself ignoring and skipping the “27” position (indicating the center of the cube) a lot; in doing this, I was unconsciously taking out the “self” position. per[mute]ing also relates to bigger issues of dance training and lineage. In making the piece, I incorporated the movement from all the dance forms I've encountered, adopted, rejected, and absorbed living in this Taiwanese dancing body. The dance lineages that I carry in my body via years of movement training have shaped my identity as a mover and choreographer.

I was honored and grateful to receive a lot of positive feedback after performing per[mute]ing in Ten Artists Respond to Locus. Critic Allan Ulrich said that it had “a curious serenity.” Critic David Moreno wrote:

Kao dismantled [Locus] into something soulful, breaking down sharp lines and gestures into fluid presence. She danced without the 4×4 confinement suggesting something much bigger, freer, and authentically her own. Kao’s dancing is always a pleasure to behold, always deeply genuine. 

It has long been interesting to me that no one seems have a problem seeing me as an Asian dancer when I do Eurocentric dance forms. Ironically, when I did Taiwanese/Chinese movement in per[mute]ing, viewers started seeking cultural meanings. An audience asked me if I was “trying to empower my Asian identity.” But I have never thought of empowering my Taiwanese identity by using Taiwanese movement in my work. The audience’s feedback led me to several questions: How do people assume and perceive the separation between Western and Eastern dance forms? Why do I need to do anything to “empower” my Taiwanese identity? Why does the doing of Taiwanese movement or speaking Taiwanese suddenly allow people to see me as Taiwanese?  From my perspective I am already a Taiwanese, and nothing can change that. There is no need for empowerment.

In conclusion, there are conceptual and cultural questions that arose through this project for me. I am interested in continuing the ongoing conversation with choreographers who carry dance lineages. I am curious about what lineage means and does to the choreographers. As a Taiwanese artist who chose to move to the U.S. in my mid-30’s, I might have different experiences from people who are American-born Asian or Asians who have involuntarily immigrated to the U.S. Despite my cultural background, what I ended up expressing in per[mute]ing (from an unconscious/creative place, not with any explicit/political purpose) was simply in my dancing body and the movement. When I entered the space, audiences saw my training; they saw my lineages, they saw who I am. per[mute]ing was abstract. What people felt I wanted to say had less to do with my intentions and more to do with their own interpretations.

                                                                                             --Peiling Kao

Photo by Margo Moritz of Peiling Kao and Tracy Taylor Grubbs in per[mute]ing.

Postscript

Peiling's above reflections led to the interesting below exchange between us (Hope Mohr and Peiling Kao):

HM: Your words remind me that often whiteness is not perceived because it is the assumed “neutral." As soon as you stop dancing whiteness, somehow you are seen, and/or seen differently.

PK: Yes. What do you mean by dancing whiteness?  It leads to the another question: What is the purpose when many dance companies try to be inclusive about dancers' races? It may look diverse when showing work on stage with people/dancers of color. But if the dancers training background are basically Eurocentric, or the dance movement is still Eurocentric technique, is that still whiteness?

HM: Laila Lalami's article on whiteness helps me articulate what I mean by dancing whiteness. She writes:

"White" is seen as a default, the absence of race..."White" is a category that has afforded [whites] an evasion from race, rather than an opportunity to confront it.

Perhaps dancing whiteness means dancing under the presumption of abstraction?

Photo by Cheryl Leonard of Grubbs and Kao in rehearsal for per[mute]ing.

Program Notes for per[mute]ing (premiere)

Commissioned Artist: Peiling Kao
Curated by: Dohee Lee
Performers: Peiling Kao (dance) and Tracy Taylor Grubbs (visual art)

“The dance lineages that I carry in my (visually Asian) body via years of
(hybrid) movement training have shaped my identity as a mover and
choreographer. Even as I value these diverse movement vocabularies in
my practice, I delve into the assumed/perceived separations of Eastern
and Western dance through this response to Locus.” - Peiling Kao

per[mute]ing was made possible by Dean’s Travel Fund, University of
Hawai’i at Manoa, and the Lo Man-fei Dance Fund, Cloud Gate Culture
and Arts Foundation, Taiwan.

per[mute]ing featured a painting by commissioned artist Tracy Taylor
Grubbs: Lineage (Ink Scroll)

“Working with Trisha’s Brown’s combination of structure and play,
this scroll painting was created using six specific gestures and one of
three different brushes: a mop found on the street, a brush taped to a
long stick and a set of rags tied to one foot.” –Tracy Taylor Grubbs

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Locus Poem

Frances Richard wrote and performed the following poem as part of HMD's 2016 Bridge Project, "Ten Artists Respond to Locus, a multidisiplinary exchange inspired by dance pioneer Trisha Brown. In the performance, Richard marked the graphic symbol "<<>>" with a simple hand gesture, a quotation from Brown's Accumulation (1971). 

Frances Richard's program notes for Locus Poem:

"Locus Poem considers several kinds of 'placedness,' including a) being
subject to gravity, like absolutely everything in the universe; b) belonging
to a lineage or parentage—or not; c) questions about differences
between saying words out loud, writing words down, making gestures
with the body, and notating gestures on paper; d) questions about
thinking and moving inside categorical systems, and how such systems
are simultaneously orderly, constraining, mysterious, imperfect, secretly
outrageous, necessary. Most of the poem comes from notes I took in
2016 Bridge Project workshops with Diane Madden, Associate Artistic
Director of the Trisha Brown Company.”  

Photo by Margo Moritz of Frances Richard reading her "Locus Poem." 

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LOCUS POEM

A body is always shown in fragmentation ( so ) ( we )
seek out liquidations (  you see a sound
interlocking with its own shape in the air >>>> emanata: speed or stress lines
emphasizing valence >>>>  )

a ground-math, invented
entity to help you. Map the

spiral cross-touching while resisting
the reference-body.

“We are fools in language, yes—”
We need everyone to be a person.

∧

∨

If I disintegrate the letters in a printed page will you
receive it in particles cathected, stray in private
flesh, a borrowed impress foisted <<>> loss projected as
disintegration—no—because the blowing letters

unadhesived from their selves, their tissue words mute honey
phrases drip, smear into yours, get heady, crystalize.
Toss and regather. Leave it alone <<>> take
the backward step. Meaning don’t  

do much, just touch
the floor, the air, your bones, flesh, mind, and

others. Like, the place is there exactly
when you need to fit in it, to measure

placedness. And otherwise
it flashes, drops.                

∧

∨

Let’s practice our
politics of the lack of

—is it knowledge <<>> drawing-trace, or the weight of
keeping wanting

to over-cross? Because she is not
a piece of paper. Counterforce

to gravity is desire—will—momentum—
centrifugal

∧

∨

spin.

( So ) go ahead and lean on space

( it ) keeps ( us ) from flying off the planetary
surface, keeps our organs organized, affects every
object, creature, event constantly ( gravity
qua god, the given

mother << very available >> << a lineage
of speed or stress lines ) emphasizing >> valence.

You be time and I’ll be
space—no—take

the opposite.

∧

∨

( So ) challenge is extended

repetition like being
one unstatic place. Take agency over each orifice, resisting. Though obviously everyone
needs parents—that is, combinations
geometric, viscous, sweet, preservative, medicinal and

collectively secreted from each orifice like honey. Right now

a honey of gravity is dripping

              ( so ) The penultimate word is  
             the ground. The ultimate word  
             suspends above the head.
             Space-between is the gut.

                        ( Are you saying gravity secretes from the
                         gut of the planet—yes—are you saying
                         repetition is the mother, is a
                         valence challenge—yes—are you 

                          tossed, regathered, flashing, private, smeared
                          in language? Yes. )         

∧

           ∨

“It’s really kind of fun” she said, “to barely fall <<>> falling
requires you to connect, which is what I like

about a vocabulary motivated <<>> via falling”

through a little liquid zone, a shaped speed
or stress, invented
entity to help you organize. Qua secret mother written on the air who doesn’t
see my body, secret

body practicing its lack qua
piece of paper. Maybe now you’re wondering

what << qua >> is? In the condition of, deriving from a feminine
root meaning who. And ( so )

the shame of questions
is there exactly when you need to fit in it, and then it
flashes, drops.
Show me again

<<>> how my body appears <<>> falling <<>> I never

learned

∧

∨

( So ) think right now <<>> whose work
makes your mind possible.

Kept

that part of my safety-shape. The
inter-given, weight of the phrase

qua semiotic of the nervous line, an empty
drip of molten space that makes

the pelvis possible <<>> in the condition of
the spiral possible

I just was thinking about this all my life.   

∧

∨

( So ) see her moving

emanata in an over-remote
micro-past, saying viscous, thinking
ground-math, mapping secret
counterforce—fool practice >>>>

<<<< tongue of the muscle to lick the

                                                            numbered air.

 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks
especially to  

Brian Conley
Tracy Taylor Grubbs
Emily Hoffman
Peiling Kao
Hope Mohr
Bhumi Patel
Megan Wright
and
Diane Madden

Larry Arrington program notes from "Ten Artists Respond to Locus"

Larry Arrington in quarter. Photo by Margo Moritz. 

Following are program notes for quarter, a work by Larry Arrington in collaboration with Oscar Tidd commissioned for HMD's 2016 Bridge Project, Ten Artists Respond to Locus.  Produced in association with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. 

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A great deal of the work I did on this project was thinking. This is an imperfect map (as if there were any other kind) of some of that thinking. I entered this project hoping to fold it into my own consuming project/work/thought/feelings of looking at western history (and in this context Euro­centric art lineages) as folk/cultural forms. In this work, I wanted to look at Trisha Brown, contemporary western dance, and classical western dance as a series of interconnected folk dances situated within very specific cultural and material contexts and supported by intersecting and overlapping ideologies. I do this not solely as critique, but as a general and personally necessary set of questions that force my own relationship to history into the same cultural/anthropological questions that western thinking often imposes on other forms. This took me on a myriad of experiments, but I kept being drawn back to:

1. The very simple formal constraint of Locus:­ the bordering of space/ the map. This being drawn back to the map was also greatly informed by the crisis of border/map/territory that is an ongoing social and economic cataclysm on the surface of this planet. We gather at YBCA, in a rapidly gentrifying city, in a space built on sacred Ohlone land. We gather in a nation founded through theft/exploitation. Also…. water.

2. The dancer/laborer Diane Madden has danced in Trisha Brown’s work longer than I have been alive. I was so inspired by her beautiful leadership and her spirit as a dancer. Having Diane introduce Trisha Brown’s work put a welcome spin and complication on a western approach to expertise. It has been my experience that much has been made of Judson in letters. The mediation of academia in performance can have a certain coldness of work removed from the worker. My exposure to the monolith of the Judson canon has been frustratingly void of body, heart, context, time, and relationship. Having the dancer, Diane, centered as the expert made my heart full. So in this way I was finally able to situate Judson in the very situatedness that I love about dance: how it is something that is passed from body to body.

3. The horse.

4. The circle and the square

Stealing/Authorship-­Legacy/Lineage.
The geometries of music.
Shape note singing ­ Idumea, Ivey Memorial Singing
The reproducing structure ­ In The Upper Room Dance IX, Philip Glass

Lastly, thank you for your attention. It is sincerely appreciated and respected.

Xo, Larry

Larry Arrington in quarter. Photo by Margo Moritz. 

On Trisha and Time

by Emily Hoffman

Dancer Sarah Chenoweth performs Trisha Brown's Locus Solo (1975) as part of HMD's 2016 Bridge Project, Ten Artists Respond to Locus. Photo by Margo Moritz. 

The most pronounced difference to my eye between Trisha Brown's movement and modern or balletic forms of movement is timing, or, more specifically, the more subtle variations in timing that are allowed or produced by the availability of the body to its own weight and to gravity. I first noticed this phenomenon in X when we were teenagers and it took me a long time—until now, really—to realize what was producing it, but I did for many years find different ways of describing to myself what it looked like. I noticed it most clearly, of course, when she was dancing in unison with other people who didn’t share this same quality. Say there was a simple drop and lift of the arm—from horizontal, to vertical, to horizontal again. You’d see the arms start to come down, and it would seem X was somehow behind the count. You could feel the unit of time and see how the other arms were going to make it back, and X’s arm seemed leisurely by comparison, unconcerned. Then a surprising thing would happen. The count would arrive and suddenly there her arm was, floating into horizontal, more subtly on it than anyone else’s. But she hadn’t sped up—that was the magic of it. I used to say it was like her blood was made of time, that’s how dexterous she was with it; it seemed she could move time, making it expand or contract. The even arcs of the other arms seemed crass by comparison. It occurs to me now that what I was seeing was the subtle, organic ease and variation that comes from the play between a release into weight and a more muscular resistance to gravity. I suppose you could also call this phrasing, in another kind of dancing, and a dancer can have a gift with time separate from this particular released weight that I’m referring to. It’s what they call musicality, I think, in ballet. But perhaps it amounts to the same thing. How the dancer relates to control and release in her own body, a relation to momentum, to gravity, and to resistance. Choreography will always specify a point A and a point B, and even if these points become closer and closer together, there will always be some distance between them that the dancer must traverse in her own manner. I have a weakness for projecting aesthetics into the realm of the ethical, but it’s hard for me not to feel that something about the character of the dancer is revealed in exactly this, the body’s native relation to the structure it occupies. Whether it rushes to fulfill the structure, whether it adorns it, whether it holds itself in reserve. Why is it always that reserve and abandon seem to go hand in hand? I’m always drawn to describe Farrell’s dancing with this kind of paradox. Precisely to the extent that she gives herself to the movement her SELF is revealed to be a separate entity, out of reach. This is absolutely different from a coy restraint. By contrast, it is the absolute absorption of the dancer in the execution of the dance that gives the dancer back to herself. I see this as a kind of grace in effort, otherwise known as devotion.

--

Emily Hoffman is the Director of Affinity Project, one of ten artists commissioned to create new work in response to Trisha Brown's Locus (1975), as part of Hope Mohr Dance's 2016 Bridge Project, Ten Artists Respond to Locus, produced in association with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.  This post is one in a series that will feature ephemera from the Locus Bridge Project. 

Affinity Project performing Color grid with talking (after Locus), part of "Ten Artists Respond to Locus." Featured performers (L to R): Nora el Samahy, Atossa Babaoff, Bea Basso.  Photo by Margo Moritz. 

DISCOTROPIC and white critical response

by Megan Wright

niv Acosta bills his work DISCOTROPIC as an exploration into science fiction, disco, astrophysics, and the black American experience. Acosta, a Brooklyn-based trans and queer director of black and Dominican descent, has set up a world that derails the structurally racist consumption of black bodies. It’s a pop-cultural critical intervention that rearranges the roles of critics, artists, and audiences in discourse on performance. Neon-lit in the cavernous basement of the Westbeth Artists Community in Lower Manhattan, DISCOTROPIC’s warmth and artificial forestry were a planet away from the January night outside. 

Acosta was inspired in part by Diahann Carroll's role in the 1978 Star Wars holiday special. It's a bizarre cameo: Carroll, the only character of color in the special, appears as a holographic projection named Mermeia, generated to satisfy the erotic fantasies of Chewbacca's (equally hirsute) father. During DISCOTROPIC, Ashley Brockington recites Mermeia's monologue in a haughty purr, crawling above the audience with a silver cape trailing behind her: "we are excited, aren't we? I'll tell you a secret: I find you — adorable."

Justin Allen in DISCOTROPIC. Photo by Maria Baranova.

Despite heavy use of projections in DISCOTROPIC, particularly during Justin Allen's exploratory opening solo, it's flesh-and-blood bodies that Acosta pushes us to encounter and confront. The performers execute a durational twerking score in a series of cells along one wall of the room. A sharp switch from neon to blacklight reveals large white eyes painted on the performers' backsides that float and shake in the dark, suddenly pinning observer as observed. Acosta is imposing a switch in audience/performer structure that recalls Gayatri Spivak’s words in The Post-Colonial Critic: “the holders of hegemonic discourse should de-hegemonize their position and themselves learn how to occupy the subject position of the other.”

The twerking continues for twenty minutes, moving steadily through and above the audience, just out of sync with a thumping beat. I'm reminded of Adrian Piper's notes on her own 1970s disco works, Aretha Franklin Catalysis and Some Reflective Surfaces I:

To succeed in dancing to disco music, and to perform the full spectrum of figures and gestures that are part of that, is to express one's sexuality, one's separateness, one's inner unity with one's own body; and in a sexually repressive, WASP-dominated culture, this is to express defiance. I think this explains why certain kinds of people become so uncomfortable around blacks and gays on the dance floor who can really strut their stuff... At the same time as you express defiance and self-containedness through disco dancing, you also open yourself to a wide range of responses from others, most of which are misinterpretations: for example, you're being seductive. you want to be picked up, and so on. As though your own pride and pleasure in your physical experiences weren't enough. 

For Acosta, pride and pleasure in physical experience, particularly that shared with his three cast members, is enough. He, Brockington, Allen, and Monstah Black pace through a series of unison motions on a platform stage, organized in a neat box, and cue each other to shift between motions with a soft hiss. (Piper talks about "the political unity that can be achieved through self-consciously unifying one's self-presentation as a dance object with other such objects that are equally self-conscious.") They sing a mesmeric and melismatic version of "We Travel the Spaceways" off the Afrofuturist musician Sun Ra's 1962 album When Sun Comes Out from atop a spiral staircase. Each pulls in and out of the group for solo verses, backed always by the others and by Dion Tygapaw on electric bass. They end the work with an improvised copying score in which leadership transfers seamlessly from performer to performer.

 

L to R: Acosta, Allen and Brockington in DISCOTROPIC. Photo by Maria Baranova.

DISCOTROPIC is a ritualistic piece that offers precious few handholds to the audience throughout the evening. Is this a show or a meditative practice? What non-hierarchical and verdant planet are we on? Acosta deliberately presents his work as being on the edge between performance and visual art. Like Ralph Lemon, he wants to be critically situated beyond the dance field.

Acosta is rarely reviewed by white-centric mainstream publications. This failure of attention does not bode well for the evolution or continued relevance of these publications. In an interview with Vice Magazine's Creators Project, Acosta states: “I wanted to think about people who don’t get the amount of visibility that they deserve... DISCOTROPIC thinks about how that applies to the current climate of racial representation now.” This nowness is the work's most compelling element.

Kate Mattingly's recent trenchant article on BAYWATCH addresses the widespread failure of predominantly white mainstream outlets to give consideration to work like Acosta's — work whose lineage and inheritance is derived from a nonwhite canon. This work develops in alternative spaces and is often created and performed by queer and trans people of color. It prioritizes process and ritual over "the pretty, the linear, and the familiar." Mattingly notes:

Studying dance criticism in the 20th and 21st centuries in the United States I notice a tendency to sublimate experiences that are variable and esoteric to words that are accessible and clear. What happens when our experiences are not legible, when a performance highlights the obscurity, vulnerability, and uncertainty that pervade life? What happens when an artist emphasizes the systemic exclusions of people of color from comforts and opportunities?

What happens with white critical response to work that emphasizes the lived experience of people of color, I think, is what Mattingly sees in Allan Ulrich's scoffing review in the San Francisco Chronicle of Filipino-American choreographer Gerald Casel's Splinters in our Ankles: "an unwillingness to engage an artist’s work on its own terms." The terms Acosta sets forth in DISCOTROPIC are Afrofuturist, fantastic, and celebratory. Casel’s terms are anti-colonial, deeply personal, and wry. Both deserve more of what Rebecca Solnit (as quoted by Mattingly) calls counter-criticism that “seeks to expand the work of art, by connecting it, opening up its meanings, inviting in the possibilities." I freely acknowledge that, as a white person who performs and writes about mostly “linear and familiar” dances, I'm not the best person to craft cogent counter-criticism for DISCOTROPIC. But I can encourage you to see the work for yourself. 

Adrian Piper's 1982 writing Notes on Funk II describes what she'd learned in performing her disco works:

I had always assumed that any meaningful political work I did had to involve utilizing the advantages of my middle-class education and aesthetic acculturation as resources 'for the benefit of' the disadvantaged community from which I came... this view now seems to me to be laden with patronizing, elitist assumptions about who has what of value to offer to whom. The funk idiom of black working-class culture is an unbelievably rich and enriching art form… that has invaluable gifts to offer that audience, and not just the other way around.

During DISCOTROPIC, the performers gather up a wide, runway-length strip of black paper. Working together, they bundle it delicately into a huge nest and lift it above their heads. Then they slowly process through the audience. 2015 was a year of photograph after photograph after news clip after body-cam video of black and trans bodies being invaded, violated, and killed. After such a year, Acosta's engineering of an alternative and multi-faceted site of possibility where an audience stood back in deference to this procession was, as Piper says, an invaluable gift. 

The cast of DISCOTROPIC and projection of 1974 Afrofuturist science-fiction film Space Is The Place featuring Sun Ra and his Arkestra. Photo by Maria Baranova.

NOTES/REFERENCES

Diahann Carroll as Mermeia in the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special (start video at 2:20)

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (Routledge, 1990)

bell hooks, “Representation of Whiteness in the Black Imagination,” Black Looks: Race and Representation (South End Press, 1992)

Mayfield Brooks, "IWB = Improvising While Black", Contact Quarterly, Winter/Spring 2016.

Shelton Lindsay, "Dance Artist niv Acosta Creates a Space of His Own", Vice Magazine, February 27, 2015. 

Kate Mattingly, “fresh festival: critical focus,” BAYWATCH, January 22, 2016. 

Adrian Piper, “Notes on Funk II,” Out of Order, Out of Sight: Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968-1992 (MIT Press, 1996)