What Remains unites poet and MacArthur Fellow Claudia Rankine, Bessie Award–winning choreographer Will Rawls, and filmmaker John Lucas for a unique, collaborative live performance. The performers stage encounters with themselves and one another, poetically addressing the erasure and exposure that drive the historical murder and disturbance of black citizens. Layered with language, video, dance, and music references, the performance invites its audience into the dreamlike environment of an entombed imagination and responds to violence and disappearance with a resonant, ghostly chorus. As its performers insist on their own bodily presence within a society that curtails their movements, What Remains unfolds a spectrum of physical actions to challenge and destabilize how the audience comes to recognize personhood.

What Remains is performed in the MCA Warehouse, reflecting the influence of Chicago’s sprawling geography on the tundra-like psychic space of the performance. It is a Live Arts Bard Production and is created in collaboration with and performed by Leslie Cuyjet, Jessica Pretty, Tara Aisha Willis, and sound designer Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, with production design by David Szlasa and costume design by Eleanor O’Connell.

RUNNING TIME: 60 minutes

PROGRAMMED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THREEWALLS