Brief Liberation: Experiments in Black Feminist Embodied Practice by Anna Martine Whitehead, Tara Aisha Willis, and Damon Locks
Lecture/Demonstration (bring something to write with/on)
Anna Martine Whitehead and Tara Aisha Willis present embodied assembly and improvisational practices as tools for deliberate indeterminacy and Black feminist sustenance in two movement-driven performances. Each moment is punctuated with live improvised music by Damon Locks—space to process and reflect through practice.
Whitehead shares “assembly,” a movement score from their FORCE! an opera in three acts. Rooted in spontaneous and strategic organizing work, queer and femme Black bodies travel an undetermined distance through laborious physical contact, working out the discomforts, joys, and contradictions of embodying Black feminist collective organizing.
Willis describes performing in choreographer Will Rawls and poet Claudia Rankine’s What Remains. Its structured improvisation uses embodied strategies—citational socialities, speculative self-articulation, intra-personal polycentrism—to investigate Black living and lived experience through dynamic collaboration within theatricality’s specular curtailments.
Both presentations are embodied by Whitehead and Willis who perform excerpts of exercises from their respective research, while practicing embodied collaboration. Locks echoes themes of Black collectivity, movement, and care on a sonic register, deploying his archival wandering practice to assemble electronic samples across histories of Black sound and spoken word.
Anna Martine Whitehead does performance from the traditional homelands of the Council of the Three Fires, amongst others. Their work considers embodied epistemologies of Black queer time in liminal sites like prisons, attics, and churches. They write about race, gender, and performance; and support coalition movements committed to repair and transformation.
Photos of Anna Martine Whitehead by Anna Martine Whitehead (left) and of Anna Martine Whitehead, Jenn Freeman, Zachary Nicol, and Rahila Coats by Ricardo E. Adame (right).
Tara Aisha Willis is a dance artist, curator, and scholar who holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from NYU who lectures at the University of Chicago. Select writings appear in The Black Scholar (issue co-editor), Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures (Getty Research Institute/X Artists' Books), and Marking the Occasion (co-editor; Wendy’s Subway).
Photos of Tara Aisha Willis by Ricardo E. Adame (left) and zakkiyyah najeebah dumas-o'neal (right).
Damon Locks is a Chicago-based visual artist, educator, and musician who leads the music group Black Monument Ensemble. He teaches in the Sound Department at SAIC and, since 2014, at Stateville Correctional Center. He received a 3Arts Award, Soros Justice Media Fellowship, and Helen Coburn and Tim Meier Achievement Award.
About the American Dancing Bodies Symposium
In 2012 a curricular revolution took place at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago recognizing the American dancing body as a rich fusion of techniques originating in Africa, Europe and the United States. More than a decade since this transformation at the Dance Center, the impact locally and nationally has been profound. The 2-day American Dancing Bodies Symposium invites dance educators, enthusiasts, practitioners, scholars, and students to explore together the intersectionality of present-day dance: what's now and what's next in dance, on the stage, in the studio, and in the classroom?
