CONTACT QUARTERLY SUMMER/FALL 2017 25

RIFF TALKS, a program initiated by dance artists Jen Polins and Jennifer Nugent at the School for Contempo-rary Dance and Thought (SCDT) in Northampton, MA, in 2014, brings artists together to discuss research, practice, and process; engage in public discourse beyond their work; and focus on critical themes in dance and performance. This conversation between four artists who address identity in their choreographic, curatorial, and scholarly work took place at the SCDT studio on November 12, 2016. It was excerpted and edited by CQ from a live transcription by Shaina Cantino.

Cassie Peterson: Why is this conversation around identity and performance important to you?

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko: I’m thinking a lot about the power of ideas and their ability to pull people together. I’m thinking about theory as a way to induce societal healing and personal healing as well. And I think healing is expedited when it’s done in community. Tara Aisha Willis: When I was thirteen, a ballet teacher told me I needed to study at the Alvin Ailey School because I was tall, pretty good at modern dance, and Black. And I did that. But when I found that there were other ways of performing dance and movement-based work, I started to question some of what I had been told in my training. As someone who has always been verbally

and theoretically minded, as a writer first, I questioned why there was such a rhetoric, or a divide, between con-ceptual work that was asking theoretical questions about dance and what I was being told my body was supposed to do. I don’t believe that divide exists in life. Since then, my whole life story has been about trying to figure that out in my body as well as in language and, at a cellular, somatic level, to address questions about being in front of an audience, whether onstage or on a street, and how that transmutes to how movement, dance, and performance get to collide. Joy Mariama Smith: The question about identities is interesting for me to inhabit today, related to my own work and life. I don’t know how my work doesn’t relate to identities. Sara Smith: I came to have new questions about identity as a direct consequence of starting my life in dance in my twenties. I would say that my previous relationship to identity was one of rejection only—rejecting identities that had been laid out for me. And also one of rejecting my body in general, as someone who identifies as genderqueer broadly speaking. For me, that’s inextricable from the political climate that we live in and questions about how I see myself versus how I am seen. These questions are particularly important for me to be asking as a white person who can pass in various ways.

[Front to back] Drew Kaiser, Kimya Imani Jackson, and Joy Mariama Smith in Spells, choreographed by Joy Mariama Smith, thefidget space in Philadelphia, PA, October, 2012. photo © Adam Peditto

RIFF TALKing on Identity and Performance with Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Joy Mariama Smith, Sara Smith, and Tara Aisha Willis; moderated by Cassie Peterson

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CP: How do identities shift in relationship to contexts, like environments and location? JMS: Being gender nonconforming as one of my identities, and relating that to performance in many aspects of my life—as an architect, as a curator, as an academic, as a critic—I find that I’m moving around a lot in my perfor-mance of gender, and that relates to context. Artists a lot of times are rejecting expectations based on identity and asking, “How can I constantly reject these ideas and con-tinue to move around?” This is a form of activism, but it’s very complex. There’s a super-entangled, nonstatic way that I inhabit these sorts of spaces, which comes from paradox.… I’m curious about how I can continuously relate to the many paradoxes of the multiple identities that I have, not just as an artist.

TAW: On what spectrum are we aware of our own shift-ing use of identity, or inhabiting of identity, and of other people around us shifting identity in relationship to our-selves? There are folks who may not think about that at all, right?—not necessarily thinking about themselves as shift-ing but maybe as a singular or essential identity. Some may not even need to think of identity on a regular basis. Something that performance studies gifts us as a field of study is a way of thinking about how we come into rooms in everyday life, or into relationship with other peo-ple, or the social norms that we all traffic in all the time, and how we are, through our perceptions, performing on other people. We’re also reestablishing a performative reiteration of those norms by living up to them or not. We may be shifting those norms. It may not be so one-to-one, but that way of thinking through the lens of performance studies gives us some sort of attention to our own—dare I call it—code-switching.

CP: How does dance potentially reaffirm or disrupt and challenge dominant assumptions about identity? How does it do this for dancers in our training, and how does it do this for an audience in performance?

JOK: My relationship to dance is a turbulent one at best.… I get anxiety just thinking about the franchise that is the American concert stage situation and the marketplace around it. But I’m also trying to consistently go back to my root source and what grounded me and attracted me originally to movement as a way of life. So I’m consistently engaging in this act of remembrance as to why I’m partici- pating. I question how dance is able to situate itself in a way in which I feel understood. And so I use dance as just one of multiple tiers or pillars upon which I’m approach-ing a performative situation. My ideas around texture, smell, presentation, duration, time, gravity, language—especially language—are deeply important to me. For me, movement supports the performative situation, along with other textural choreographies. I think of language as a kind of choreography. And I think there’s a nuanced way in which ideas, or content, can be curated within a perfor-mative action. SS: Finding dance was almost a surprise for me; it came late. I went to an alternative college and the dance pro-gram there was working in a postmodern dance lineage, where the training asks you to do things like lie on the floor and feel the floor and check in with yourself and how you feel—which is really different from “first position looks like this, and this is the body you’re supposed to have to do it.” It was a really foreign thing for me to say, Who am I? What do I feel like? What does the floor feel like? It was also an amazing experience for me to ask myself, What is my body if I’m not thinking about how people see me but just thinking about what it means to be here? That was the first time I’d had an experience of a dance form in which they weren’t telling me what my role was supposed to be; they were just saying, “Be in your body.” And it also allowed me to ask, What are the physi-cal things I’m not allowing myself to do because of what the culture tells me they’re attached to? TAW: There was something that you said that struck me, of just having a relationship to where I am and how it feels to be here in this place now, and the “just” in front of that is hard for me. That is why I’m now trying to do a PhD on

One of the more recent critiques around the history of

postmodern dance is the idea of neutrality, or “just this,

now, here, right now.” Is it just that, though? What about

the fact that I’m never not Black here, now? [T.A.W.]

CONTACT QUARTERLY SUMMER/FALL 2017 27

this stuff. One of the more recent critiques around the history of postmodern dance is the idea of neutrality, or “just this, now, here, right now.” Is it just that, though? What about the fact that I’m never not Black here, now? CP: What is your relationship to history in regard to identity, and do you feel yourself referring to particular histories, events, or lineages in your work, and how? JOK: I feel as if history serves as an anchor for the way in which I’m approaching performance as a strategy to push against a severe cultural amnesia that I think we suffer from societally. There seems to be this need to forget and to erase, which is how I think we’re even able to fall into a rhetoric of America becoming “great again.” Clearly we forgot something happened, or has been happening, and that’s nothing new within the American project. I’m deeply captivated by various histories, not only my own, and what we can learn from historical traumas so that we don’t make the same mistakes again. I’m also curious about recycling—going into one’s own archive, or the cultural archive—and excavating, seeing what remnants are there and how they might be able to be reorganized to fulfill the need of the present moment. JMS: Ritual in performance relates to identity and his-tory. I’ve seen performers who inadvertently use ritual in performance that is linked to their cultural heritage and personal histories. Somehow we are surprised that we’re all touching on ritual in performance! I’m curious about how that surprise comes up in relation to cultural

amnesia and decolonization, coloring diasporic identi-ties and what is transmitted.… My experience is that I don’t know how to be present without calling on some other history, even if it’s subconscious or unconscious. Because that’s how I got here. JOK: We were talking about double, triple consciousness, multiplicity—how these multiple ways of being or simul-taneous ways of being creep up on us, or some of us, and we’re always sort of negotiating it. Whiteness has been something that I’ve had to have a deep, associative, learned understanding of as a result of having to live in the world. So it’s like this alternate world that I feel very well versed in, having had to negotiate it constantly. It finds its way into my performance work, either the undoing of it or the revealing of it, or trying to wake certain individuals into their own understanding of how it’s working in their own bodies, or maybe not working at the same time. I made this work called #negrophobia in 2015. In order to make a piece about negrophobia, you have to know what is on the other side of this fear. And as a result of that investigation, I came across a really impor-tant essay by James Baldwin, which is titled “On Being White…and Other Lies.” [Originally published in Essence magazine in 1984.] I find an audience member to read the essay aloud as part of the conclusion of the work. So as this essay is being read, incense is being lit, I’m pulling out a siren, the lights are sort of breaking down, there’s a camera on the person who’s reading the text, and I go through a literal exorcism of my own taught behaviors. I came into this ritual through a deep personal and socie-tal pain; it kind of revealed itself. All of those actions had

[Left to right] Joy Mariama Smith, Tara Aisha Willis, Sarah Smith, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, and Cassie Peterson at RIFF TALKS Identity in Performance, SCDT, Northampton, MA, November 2016.

photo © Peter Raper

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to be layered simultaneously. It was kind of like casting my own magic spell. It all had to happen in order for the transformation to take place.

SS: I also do a lot of collaging. This practice comes from a place of wanting to create alternate histories and figure out where I can pull in people who feel like my kin from throughout history, across identities, and also to create possible alternate futures. As someone who is queer iden-tified—where my history doesn’t necessarily exist in the archives in any direct form, or is told through bits and pieces in other people’s documents, maybe not even sym-pathetic people but police records and things like that—I use historical research creatively, however I want to use it to construct narrative. For me, that’s really important for resisting the way the world has said I’m supposed to think about myself as somebody who has just appeared, without a history. I want to say that I do have a history and I even have a future, and that I can suggest what that looks like.

In this way of working, I owe a debt to Afrofuturism and to thinkers like José Esteban Muñoz and Jessica Marie Johnson.

JMS: I’m forty years old; I was born in the seventies. So when I talk about my aunt and my parents, they’re all around eighty. I want to talk about my grandfather in relationship to racism, because with him being born in 1913 and working in the coal mines in a town that no longer exists, that isn’t even on the map, and me being a child of the seventies and hanging out with my grand-father, I really remember him not liking white people—really aggressively not liking white people. And I was around white people because that’s the world, and how he expressed that and how I came to understand why he felt that way—working in the coal mines and the names he was called—and how the space that he was allowed to take up with his own identity was very, very small compared to the space I had as a child and even now as an adult. On top of that, my mother and my aunts were all artists in some way, musicians or dancers, and they all stopped when they got to a certain age. And as I aged and as I surpassed the age when they stopped…why did they all stop? It’s linked to the era when they became house-wives and didn’t have space to be a wife and a parent and an artist. They had to eclipse very large parts of themselves. That shapes me because I don’t want to do that. I’m sort of always evading boxes and making them round because I want to continue to fight, I want to take up space over here, I want to take up space over here.

My experience is that I don’t know how

to be present without calling on some

other history, even if it’s subconscious

or unconscious. Because that’s how I

got here. [J.M.S.]

Joy Mariama Smith in an excerpt of their solo work Joyride at SCDT, Northampton, MA, November 2016.

phot

o © P

eter

Rap

er

CONTACT QUARTERLY SUMMER/FALL 2017 29

TAW: My father grew up in Jim Crow Mississippi, and he left to be a jazz musician. He made some particular choices in his life to go against his upbringing, his Baptist home, with the preacher, to become a Buddhist and an artist, playing “the devil’s music,” and to move North, and all of that—to tour the world. And at the same time, in choosing to inhabit a lot of spaces that were very white,which was a choice, also watching him my whole life do the most intense code-switching that I’ve ever seen. Because his aspirations for his daughters were so focused around certain ideas of what success looked like, he was in a lot of

white spaces for our benefit. Putting us into schools that were the better schools, and watching him be in those rooms and literally change his voice, not only his gram-mar and how he talked but actually his tone of voice; he’d bring his voice up.… He was always trying not simply to ease white folks’ minds but to ease them in advance of his own entry into the room. I think it was a very clear physical, social, political practice he was engaged in, which then of course I inherited, in a very different way, in a “that’s normal” kind of way. JOK: I’m a child of Reagan, part of the society of the lost Black boys from urban environments. I look around the room and I’m like, Where are the other thirtysomething Black men? Oh, they’re in prison, that’s where they are. So I’m aware of this immense loneliness. I consider us these unicorns. Whenever we see each other, it’s like this weird familiarity in a way. It’s like, “I see you in the airport; where you going? OK.” It’s almost nostalgic, it’s so intense and special and strange and awkward at the same time. Because there’s this performance of Black masculinity that is one’s armor in a moment, there are all of these social norms that one has to adhere to. So the moments of intimacy or connection become far in between if at all. I think there’s a disservice that we are experiencing as a result of not being able to fully engage with the complexi-ties of what this special identity has to offer or could have offered in the present moment.

u

To learn more about the artists: Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, philadiction.org; Joy Mariama Smith, www.yournameherecollective.com; Sara Smith, www.sarasmithprojects.com; Tara Aisha Willis, taraaishawillis.tumblr.com

History serves as an anchor for

the way in which I’m approaching

performance as a strategy to

push against a severe cultural

amnesia that I think we suffer

from societally. [J.O.K]

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko in an excerpt of his Séancers & The Jigaboo King: An American Lyric at SCDT, Northampton, MA, November 2016. (World premiere at Abrons Arts Center, New York City, December 2017.)

photo © Peter Raper