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Great field trip to MoMA in April 2019! On the pic: Performing Memory class with Professor Layla Zami and Interdisciplinary Artist and MoMA Educator Kerry Downey.

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“Nari Ward: We the People” features over thirty sculptures, paintings, videos, and large-scale installations from throughout Ward’s twenty-five-year career, highlighting his status as one of the most important and influential sculptors working today. Since the early 1990s, Ward has produced his works by accumulating staggering amounts of humble materials and repurposing them in consistently surprising ways. His approach evokes a variety of folk traditions and creative acts of recycling from Jamaica, where he was born, as well as the material textures of Harlem, where he has lived and worked for the past twenty-five years. Yet Ward also relies on research into specific histories and sites to uncover connections among geographically and culturally disparate communities and to explore the tension between tradition and transformation.

He uses language, architecture, and a variety of sculptural forms to reflect on racism and power, migration and national identity, and the layers of historical memory that comprise our sense of community and belonging. “Nari Ward: We the People” brings together many of Ward’s most iconic sculptures alongside a number of works that have not been seen in New York since they were originally created. The exhibition demonstrates Ward’s status as a key bridge between generations of American sculptors and a vital advocate for art’s capacity to address today’s most urgent issues. 

Nari Ward | The New Museum | 2019

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How does Times Square hold memories as a landscape and timescape? How do people who lived and who are living share these memories?

Photography project in collaboration with Jake.

- Does memory exist within a landscape? Could it remember what it once was? Will the makeup of a landscape predict the history of what's to come? I find myself giving life to the land we live on. Questioning the space I’m moving. Picturing it as less of a path from point A to point B, but an exchange. A handshake. A constant conversation. The memories of the future’s past haunt the codes of traded energy, shared space, and destiny. If we look at the past as an elder sharing her memory - we can potentially see how she’s been telling us histories and possibly predicting the future for so long.

- Being that I recently moved to New York City for grad school, I am interested in the endless memories that the city is showing me. Maybe if I listen, I can discover more about my own role in this wild city. Has the city been revealing its own memory since the beginning? To wade through some of these inquiries, let’s begin at the point that everyone knows of when they think of NYC. Times Square. Crossroads of the world. But let’s break open Times Square’s memory.

- We begin in Longacre Square. A seedy patch of tenement rooftops under the stars of Manhattan. You could see the stars in 1903. However, Longacre Square was quickly a forgotten fragment of the past. The erection of the Times Building brought new splendor. Named after the newspaper that was printed in the basement below, the Times Building was one of Manhattan’s first skyscrapers completed in 1904. The building went down four levels underground to accommodate the printing of the Times newspaper. Standing just above an intersection of the very new, life-changing tunnels of transportation known as the subway. New York City developed its subway system in 1904, right alongside the construction of the Times building. All eleven train lines intersected near the building.  With all of the new additions to this now infamous patch of land; the name change from Longacre Square to Times Square ignited. Rock had been carved down four levels for foundation and spooned out for underground trains to bellow below the city. With the new building, a new name and all eleven intersecting subway lines, “America’s Town Square” is bound to be the center of the universe. This grungy, seedy, virtually unimpressive patch of tenements would soon become something even the sun had no prediction of. Or did it…?

- The roaring 20’s brought prolific intrigue to America’s Square with the rise of prohibition. Prohibition swirled the liquor out of every facade but deep within the veins of the city, the booze and jazz were still pulsing. Times Square was known as one of the only places to go to still find some successful nights with alcohol. This began the separation of Times Square at night and Times Square during the day. With new realms of transportation causing rapid construction of entertainment centers like The Olympia (1914) and The Hippodrome (1917) — Times Square was soon seen as the entertainment capital of America. Though, along with prohibition, the 20’s resurfaced the memory of the once Longacre Square. However, the danger and exoticism only arrived once the sun fell into night. Thus, creating a renowned entertainment scene during the day, and an equally notorious yet dazzlingly twisted entertainment scene at night. This only lead to the burgeoning infamy of Times Square. Here — we see the first resurgence of the original seediness of Longacre. Remembering who she was before they changed her exterior. Thus, the squalidity of Longacre simply painted her nails, put on some lipstick, poured herself a drink and came back to where she once used to reign. Almost as if she remembered when she was Longacre. This time, however, she came at night. If she were to stick around, she had to play by the rules and her fans loved her even more than her original form. The daytime brought the emergence of 67 new theaters. Live shows glittered with splendor and extravagance. The epitome of entertainment. With the heat of these new theaters firing, this only allowed room for more peepshows at night. The daytime life of Times Square so effortlessly caressed the nightlife. The memory of Longacre made her appearance again. This time, much more lavish. This new edifice poses a new question. Could this fanciful blast of daytime entertainment and avant-guard nightlife coexist forever? Or does the memory of what used to be, affect what the future will indeed be?

-  As we skip over to the dynamic era of Times Square in the ’50s and ’60s, we must pay tribute to the crash of 1929. This crash began the voluted downward trajectory. Times Square would no longer be a beacon of heightened entertainment by day and a mystical land for the degenerates and their darlings at night. Instead, the night would slowly begin to bring a new sexual revolution to Times Square. The memory of Lady Longacre would once more creep her fingers into the future of Times Square bringing the golden age to its first end. The rise of burlesque in the 1930s spiraled into a bold and fiery sex industry by the ’50s and ’60s. During the war, before soldiers were shipped off, they were willing to spend whatever they needed to have a good time. The place they went to was Times Square. This lead to a flourish of the sex industry that now not only existed at night but began bleeding into the overall energy of Times Square. Glorious hotels such as The Astor became secret meeting places and hideouts for all different sex communities. LGBTQIA+ made a new headway into the lives of New Yorkers during the turn of the century. Once landmarks like The Astor, The Olympia, and The Hippodrome were demolished around this time, the memory of Longacre had won. Times Square’s magnificence had come to an end. But where did all that energy of grand entertainment and larger than life notions of viability go? It turned sordid. It turned steamier than ever. Psychedelic visual landscapes promenaded all over the streets of Times Square offering a dazed and drunken view of the era. The night only got more wicked as the danger began lurking on the surface of the day. Shadows were illuminated as the smoke blocked out the sun and the seedy memory of Longacre was again in full view. Though, this time… she was back with a vengeance.    

A lot can be told about the climate of Times Square through its notorious signage. The big, flashy billboards are not a recent insurgence. As long as the signs of Times Square were beaming, so was its prosperity. Whether that prosperity is family friendly or not is not a part of this argument. However, the 1970s was the first time companies stopped advertising in Times Square. Old billboards and empty spaces began to pepper the crossroads. This was the first indication that something was very wrong. If Times Square wasn’t an entertainment mecca or a booming sex industry… what was it? Dangerous. Hazardous. More wild than ever. New York City was amid bankruptcy in the 1980s and this forced Times Square into the role of the anti-hero of its former self. Similar to the days when Times Square was the seedy Longacre with rows and rows of flats; the landscape may have changed but that similar energy was back. Though, this time, there was a wave of anger. Almost as if the memory of Longacre were a haunting instead of a pleasantry. This swift change caused Times Square to be the hub of drug lords, prostitutes, and criminals. A place to avoid at all costs. No longer the place to go for entertainment.  

So what happens next? 57 skyscrapers to block out the sleaze? That was once a proposed plan. However, the developers decided to take a different approach. How about… a new Broadway theatre that catered to families? Good idea! Thus, the New Amsterdam was renovated and brought back to play family-friendly Broadway shows in the 1990s. This lead to the birth of Lion King on Broadway. This ascendance of families to the area brought forth more brand name shops, a chocolate factory and bigger and brighter lights than ever before. But what about the brass and crass memory of Longacre Square that had continued to grow and evolve over time? She was finally pushed out. Times Square not only became family friendly but tourist friendly. No longer a place for New Yorkers to feel at home. Much like the memory of Longacre, they were pushed out too and now tourist traps patrolled the area. The rich street life and risky allure that once made NYC the energetic attraction it once was, was finally no longer. Thus, the saying: “there is a broken heart for every light on Broadway”. But the memory of old Times Square, and arguably the memory of the ever transformative Longacre Square still remain within the flashing lights along 42nd. Whether it was your home, your palace of fun, your seedy secret, your dangerous adventure or your time with family, Times Square remembers it all. We wouldn’t have Times Square today without the memory of the past. She may be gone but never forgotten.  

- My thoughts? Well… I never saw Times Square other than what she is today. Oh, how I would have loved to meet the memory, the energy of Longacre. She couldn’t seem to let go of her home. But all things must come to an end someday, right? Times Square may lack the enticement of her past but she will always have one thing… She is still the crossroads of the world. America’s town square. Even today, people who have never visited the country can at least name one thing... Times Square. Her lights can even be seen from space. Maybe time does stand still at those cross streets and it’s simply us humans that keep moving. Though… just possibly… if we take the time to remember the past, well… maybe we can see that she never left in the first place.  

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Renae and I (Victor) walked around the memorial for the victims of the 9/11 2001 attack on the Twin Towers.  We sat down and talked about our feelings about memory, memorials, and the different meanings that this date has in our minds.  We were both very young in 2001 and saw the events of that day through the lens of young kids.  Today, it is hard to have a conversation about this event without it evoking strong emotions.

Memorials like this can be seen as a site of resistance, but also as an institutional attempt to direct memory to particular narratives and through affective discourses of trauma and cultural unity.  The reality of what events in history evoke in our memory, especially those that happen on the same day decades apart, can be quite different.  We offer this conversation as an attempt to dwell on these issues of national/cultural memory, and the collapsing of time and space in memorial sites.

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Mora-Amina

              “I ended my last book, Images Matters, with a childhood memory of my father's quiet hum — the hum of a man mourning the loss of his wife. On the night of my mother's funeral, surrounded by his entire family and all of his friends in our home, my father hummed my mother's favorite Roberta Flack song. Swaying back and forth while his eleven-and-thirteen-year old daughters sang over the record, he hummed instead of crying. A hum can signify a multitude of things. A hum can be mournful; it can be presence in absence or can take the form of a gritty moan in the foreground or a soothing massage in the background. It can celebrate, animate, or accompany. It can also irritate, haunt, grate, or distract.

              On that indelible night in the basement of our home, my father humming in the face of the unsayability of words. Even now, the memory of my father's quiet hum connects me to feelings of loss I cannot articulate in words, and it provokes in me a simultaneously overwhelming and unspeakable response. It is this exquisitely articulate modality of quiet— a sublimely expressive unsayability that exceeds both words, as well as what we associate with sound and utterance— that moves me towards a deeper understanding of the sonic frequencies of quotidian practices of black communities[1].”

 You Heard of Roberta?

My initial response to these thoughtful words by Tina Campt was of course to make a dance. But once I read and reread this passage— three, four, five times— I was drawn to the mention of one Mrs. Roberta Flack, and left querying, which song was being referenced, which album? Knowing this was not the focus of Campt’s writing, I couldn’t help but to be inspired to go down my own sonic frequency rabbit hole. If I was going to make an embodied response to Campt, I would have to listen to Flack's catalog once again. Upon the first melancholy truthfully articulated chords, I was reminded of how penetrating Roberta Flack sound is. In the midst of this re-membering I realized I was veering away from what I initially intended my project to be, I wanted to make a performance and written piece about the Black utterance: the hum, the moan and the groan.

I wanted to speak to these Black utterances call and explore a Black embodied response through dance, this is a project that I will return to at a later date. Allowing this shift in my creative agenda, I viewed this as a chance to engage with a Diasporic spidering of thought. According to Nadine George-Graves, this is when, “The multidirectional process by which people of African descent define their lives. The lifelong ontological gathering of information by going out into the world and coming back to the self (George-Graves).” With this in mind, I gave myself over to Flack’s voice— a poetry in motion, gentle, penetrative and firm. I ruminated how its sound has played a distinct role in the transmission of Black dance aesthetics. This is specifically true of Black male choreographers. Often Flacks music is used to display a Black femininity as seen through the eyes of Black men.

I was struck by Flack’s voice; subversive in it's quiet deliverance, even when Flack is at the height of her vocal range, the pinnacle of story in song, her voice displays such technique and control that she is never screaming or yelling. Her sound is a centered power, crystal clear, shattering any emotional wall that the listener has erected. You never, ‘just listen’ to Roberta Flack, you become affixed to her sonics and in turn her story, resulting in a space time shift. You are brought to the scene of the loves lost crime she is depicting and are both seeing for the first time and reliving for the umpteenth time her and your story, you are sonically conjoined. Her singing makes short shrift of the listeners ears, cutting straight to the heart of the truth of the matter of all human existences. When a Black female dancer is chosen to respond to Flack’s call, this is a rite of passage, you have been anointed and are moving from mere female dancer to WO-MAN dancer. This is of great importance because you are faced with the herculean task of merging performing an embodied response to Flacks vocals and at the same time authentically portraying the character's story and point of view. This is something that can only be expertly transmitted through a body that has had mature living experiences.

The choreographers that have used Flack evidence both the traditional dance movements of Black dance aesthetics— driving speed, and frenetic energy— and at the same time displays movements of softer hues— languid arms, leg adagios and full all-knowing womanly undulations, and TIME to do so. When Flack is used it is slower, deliberate, patient even. It works less in the instantly demonstrative, and more inside of a deep, particular gendered Black femininity to tell stories of the girls, women and the mothers.

Examples of this are Donald McKayle’s Songs of the Disinherited, choreographed in 1972, the female solo Angelitos Negros , Billy Wilson’s Rosa choreographed in 1975, the all-female work featuring one female soloist to I Told Jesus  Kevin Iega Jeff’s The Yellow Dress, the song Do What You Gotta Do, and Ronald K. Brown’s For Mother, choreographed in 2005, the song Go Up Moses, these are all examples of specific female dance stories being conveyed through Black male choreographers. What may sound patriarchal, is actually an embodied expression of “speaking nearby[2]”, as Trinh T. Minh Ha would say. Perhaps expressing and paying homage to the Black women these men grew up with, were nurtured by and loved. These choreographies are odes to Black female stories and lives.

I performed Songs of the Disinherited while with Dallas Black Dance Theater in 2002. I was an ambitious young dancer that was awed and ready to work hard for Mr. McKayle. I was selected to dance the opening trio in the four-section ballet. I hoped I would have a chance to dance Angelitos Negros, but that was not to be, as there were women who had far more seniority than I did waiting to take on the mammoth dance task. They had been biding their time for the current soloist to leave. Learning the dance in secret hoping for their moment to display their worthiness, dance consecration of their WOMAN-NESS. Looking back at that time, I wasn’t ready, I had lived a bruising 24 years, but I was lacking the dance wisdom to apply to Roberta Flack’s question in the song, “ Painter of saints in the bedroom, if you have a soul in your body why have you in painting your paintings forgotten black people? Whenever you paint churches, you paint beautiful angels, but you never remember to paint a black angel.”

My chance to have a dialogue with Flack came in 2005 when I was chosen to dance in a newly commissioned work by Ronald K. Brown while at Philadanco. For Mother was a ballet that was choreographed and built on me and around me. This was an ordination, a crossing over of sorts, I was allowed into a very small club of Black women performers, a club that instead of a special hand shake, has special diasporic dance movements that very few can embody. These experiences are long ago, but unforgotten. The memories have stayed with me and informed me as an artist. A depth of re-memoring easily ignited from Tina Campt’s mention of Roberta Flack and a mourning father, humming instead of crying….

 [1] Campt, Tina M. Listening to Images. Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2017.

https://vimeo.com/29883239

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It will always be her, I and her.  We are all me.  I am all of us?  I am my past selves, my present selves and my future selves all at once at every moment. But my future self isn’t here yet and my past self is a warped memory of who I now in relationship to what happened to me then.  I don’t think she was as funny as I remembers her.  I don’t think she wasn’t as smart as I remember her.  I know for a fact that she was not as well dressed as I remember her.  But she was young (and frankly I am too) and I know the when my future self remembers my present self she will probably think the same thing.  She exists in my memory as much as she exists in my body.  My body is her body and my memory is her reality. 

 It will always be her, I and her because that is me.  

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Intentional Fragmentation - Kat Brown

This is poetry. Don’t hold me, to it.

my/your/our body is the site of materiality where time becomes itself. actualized in space, abstracted in movement.

Subjectivity is an internalized ecosystem; internalized thoughts, structures, and beliefs create a self-concept and self-understanding, this, in turn, creates systems of meaning-making that are both personal and socially situated.

my/your/our body is the site of materiality where time becomes itself. actualized in space, abstracted in movement.

Both L. Simpson in Land as Pedagogy and D. Soyini Madison* in the forward of Black Performance Theory speak of theory not just as an intellectual pursuit, but as a kinesthetic phenomenon capable of activating subjectivities and creating meaning that is personal, socially situated and embodied.

How do you fully embody the traumatized body? This is a paradox.

my/your/our body is the site of materiality where time becomes itself. actualized in space, abstracted in movement.

There is a difference between memory and “being in time”. The present is a moment that exists within the spaciousness of this threshold; a moment, fleeting as it may be, that holds us in time and at the same time carries the consciousness of the past. The present is all that is presently in action. A linear timescape proposes that the past is no longer, that is behind us and the future before us, but when we expand our definition of the now to include all that is in action in this moment the linear frame collapses and our notions of now change.

my/your/our body is the site of materiality where time becomes itself. actualized in space, abstracted in movement.

How do you fully embody the traumatized body? This is a paradox.

In Bergsonism, Deleuze states that “we have great difficulty in understanding a survival of the past in itself because we believe that the past is no longer, that it has ceased to be. We have thus confused Being with being-present. Nevertheless, the present is not; rather, it is pure becoming, always outside itself. It is not, but it acts. Its proper element is not being but the active or the useful. The past, on the other hand, has ceased to act or to be useful. But It has not ceased to be.”

my/your/our body is the site of materiality where time becomes itself. actualized in space, abstracted in movement.

This is poetry. Don’t hold me, to it.

In Movement, there is a break in the causal relationship with time as you embody imagined internal landscapes and at the same time objectively hold consciousness for this embodiment. The idea of time is separated from conceptions of linear time, separated from a conventional sense of cause and effect. And yet, the unconscious, in all of its fragmented timelessness, is still able to be embodied through the practice.

my/your/our body is the site of materiality where time becomes itself. actualized in space, abstracted in movement.

This is poetry. Don’t hold me, to it.

D. Sonya Madison illuminates the ways theory and embodiment can work in dialogue with one another, speaking about performance theory specifically they write, “the gift of performance theory is its distinct attention and indebtedness to the sensory as the senses actualize temporality, enliven desire, and embrace beauty across the poetics of bodies and the aesthetics of their creations. Performance theory honors and heightens the gravitas of the senses as gateways to the symbol-making body, its sonics, and its existential truths wrapped in art and purpose.” *** *** *** In Jungian thought, images are the language of the unconscious. Through bringing these images into an embodied state through dance the symbolic contents of the unconscious can be grounded within the body. Moving with these images and symbols is a way for unconscious material to be embodied, and this embodiment is a way for the materials of the unconscious to be integrated not just into the psyche, but into the body as well. The use of the symbolic is important because it allows you to create a sense of subjectivity without concretizing the meaning-making process. Authentic Movement creates space where the relationship is simultaneously conceptualized and embodied.

How do you fully embody the traumatized body? This is a paradox.

my/your/our body is the site of materiality where time becomes itself. actualized in space, abstracted in movement.

This is poetry. Don’t hold me, to it.

* In both of these examples theory is being spoken about as a holistic way of creating meaning that doesn’t simply account for the body, but that works from the body. Madison is speaking specifically about performance theory, which is significant because performance is a space where conscious choices around expressiveness are made and curated—it is a space where theory and subjectivity have the potential to be simultaneously embodied. In performance the body is the site of transference, it is a space where the abstract and intangible elements of selfhood are given material form. It is the site where memory and meaning are generated and expressed.

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Asia

On may 13, 2016 Chance the Rapper dropped his 3rd mixtape Coloring Book. The poet and writer Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, author of They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us and The Crown Ain’t Worth Much wrote an essay on why 2016 was the year of Chance.  Coloring Book is by far Chance’s biggest project to date and is one that he received a grammy nomination for despite not actually selling the album.  Due to Chance giving his music away for free he was initially unable to be nominated for such award that are based on sales, so the music academy decided to count streams as well. This is not why I wanted to talk about the album or the essay, I just think this is important to note so one can understand why this album was such a phenomenon. 

In his essay for MTV, Hanif mentions that “It isn’t hard to sell people on optimism, but it’s hard to keep them sold on it, especially in a year as cynical as this one. Yet as we tear the final pages out of this ferociously exhausting calendar year, Chance the Rapper stands as 2016’s greatest optimist.” I think Chance understood the times we were in and was present in his music as it is in his activism in his home city of Chicago. In her book Contemporary Performemory, Layla Zami mentions that “time is a matter that we can craft. While humans seem to move through set units of seconds, minutes hours and days they actually move through waves of emotion, through positioning in space through evolving environments snd through various levels of consciousness, all of this is at stake in how humans sense time and how times senses affect humanity.”(165). Chances music became the soundscape to the waves of time throughout 2016. Hanif goes onto mention how the summer of 2016 was one filled with an onslaught of grief with a number of unarmed black people slain by the police, the Pulse shooting in Orlando and a number of uprising like the one in Ferguson.  Despite all of this, Coloring book, a hip hop mixtape infused with Gospel melodies and riffs, became the soundtrack to our optimism, the soundtrack we all needed that summer. 

What does this have to do with memory? An album that is incessantly optimistic for many of fans, and I would argus for Hanif, is intertwined with all of the memories and moments of grief one experienced in the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency. Chance’s performed joy can be found in each of his songs but I think no other song on the album best represents his recently joy than the first and last songs on the album, “All We Got” and “Blessings(Reprise)” 

Willis-Abdurraqib, Hanif. “Chance The Rapper: Artist Of The Year.” MTV News, 14 Dec. 2016, www.mtv.com/news/2958856/chance-the-rapper-2016-artist-of-the-year/.

Zami, Layla. Contemporary PerforMemory Moving through Diasporic Dancescapes in the 21st Century. 2017.

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One important realization that I had during this course was that all memory is cultural memory. Experiences are socially situated and seen through the lens of internalized histories. We’ve been doing a lot in the course to create nuance around the idea of history and consciousness can influence how people respond in the present to various legacies. With this in mind, I wanted to create an exercise that used images to connect the personal to the cultural. My hope is that by using personal images people can locate their own stories within the greater cultural happenings that surround those stories.

After writing the exercise and completing it myself I wanted to complicate my relationship to my lineage through placing self-portraits and images I took of my cousin alongside images of my grandmother and great-grandmother. I come from a lineage of Mormonism that felt oppressive to me and that held very specific ideas about femininity and gender. I tried to distort the images of my cousin and me in an effort to challenge these ideas.

- Kat Brown

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Lyrics adapted from the Maya Angelou poem “Still I Rise”

Song by Ben Harper 

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Nari Ward