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feministshakedown-blog · 8 years ago

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Silence Series : On Privilege and Consent

i want to talk about a woman’s silent refusal

i want to raise the volume all thick

step off of a ledge

and into a gap

i want to write the word ‘consent’ out over and over, until it becomes unfamiliar and then, only when my eyes capture a new dissonance, i can begin to redefine the word’s meanings. Or rather, i can begin to find ways to talk about why its precise and neat meaning - ‘Yes’-‘No’ - can be obscured, unheard, flattened, disregarded, rendered powerless by the force of a larger bodyweight.

i want to relate to both privilege and consent in a way that punctures through the detached veil of language; cause and effect, an intellect that prioritises the verbal… and tell the story of muggy memory. The story where a vocalised ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ is absent but which nevertheless contains the invisible presence of non-consent.

These are the stories on and of the inside, that can feel appropriated by men who can hold meetings, shape policy, ask for women who have experienced violence or discrimination to tell their stories but within frameworks whose construction is biased towards patriarchy.

i have been gently observing the currents from art scenes to Hollywood, a high street to twitter feeds and words have been leaving me. Call it damage, call it baggage, call it fallout or whatever, but sometimes i feel overwhelmed by how irrefutably subjective and bodily experiences are and how in contrast, words like ‘privilege’ and ‘consent’ are used by those who society favours and who society supports in ignoring a woman’s consent.

i see the words used as a quick shorthand that isn’t far off a disembodied generality. In particular, these terms can slip into commodity - becoming buzzwords that carry with them a reductive rendering of experiences. Experiences that become exchanged by men (often with well meaning and sincere intentions) enacting their privilege of detachment.

My consent, asked for or not, given or denied, rests in my body. It collects in pools of fleshy networks of sensation. When my consent is ignored, on the outside there has been silence. The pools remain motionless. However, inside the depths while cells go into shock, my body protects and protests by archiving. Storing experiences away for when i can look.

And so i look…

Reflecting on these times, i don’t know why it was safer to give way or have my emotions burn out than voice a ‘no’.

i do know why but I don’t have the language yet

i don’t know why and that makes me feel shame

i do know why and that is part of recovering

i don’t know why and actually, it isn’t on me to answer the question

Trying to language my body and my sensations can be seen as experience at its most specific. At the same time, shared stories about when a woman didn’t consent to something but felt unable to say anything or move any muscle are so, so common. There is such a need for these women to be placed at the centre of their own experiences. Too often have I encountered people - again with varying degrees of good intentions - ask about the male experience, the male driver, their motivations. In dialogue with this, is whether the woman had misunderstood (her own body!), led the man on, asked for it. In these sexist interpretations, instead of the woman articulating moments of powerless and being listened to, she becomes a reversed sexual threat capable of ensnaring the man.

So the woman is not only blamed for her powerless, patriarchy twists the narrative, rapists become the victims and violently, they are victims in command of how the survivor of an assault is perceived. The powerful take powerlessness and transform into a power of their terms and fantasies - ‘some women enjoy it’.

But….trying…trying to resist… in relation to the power of a man….

The power i do see in these accounts of women is the strength of the silent archive. As i mentioned, born out of protection but it will be uncovered where there is support.

This archive is again questioned by ….defence lawyers…

And words drown out within the context of the cyclic distrust of female experience.

How to swim through tides of disbelief with the weight that it’s all been said so much but nevertheless continues.

Again and again i turn into myself realise that in my silence, i have reenacted precisely what systematic white supremacy wants me to enact upon myself. A diminishment of voice.

A distrust in myself. An inarticulacy because my words do not carry the same weight as those of cis-men. Even if we were to say the same thing - and we rarely do - a silence would fall in the room as the man speaks. And we all get coated in the residue of different realities privileging themselves over others.

i’ve linked the words privilege and consent because I often find that they centre whiteness and centre cis-men with those who are physically impacted by the violence left mysteriously sidelined or unaccounted for; subjected to complicated legalities and/or complex gas-lighting. I say ‘physically impacted’ to direct discussion and intensify the focus on these bodies while also feeling that all are physically impacted by actions relating to a network of privileges and consents.

Maybe consent is the only binary I believe in.

——

Written out of the enduring sadness and anger that surfaces as my body voices its survival.

An attempt to stand alongside the voices of others - on all gender spectrums.

Published to support the words of my friend Julia.

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feministshakedown-blog · 8 years ago

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Falling Score

Sitting with the small fact about me that I used to want blonde hair and blue eyes So it was. A glitch. Can you see her? This blonde woman with blue eyes. Desiring her is a young act of falling away from myself. When I catch my reflection in a window in Deptford market, I shudder. These moments are when I glitch. This is when I slip… What to fall into? Fictional movement. I often wonder what brown person in history I could be mistaken for. My brown-ness falling into anonymity. The cultural washing of ‘blackness’ we all look the same - are you two - me and another mixed-race person standing in a canteen queue - sisters? Is my imagined blonde haired companion also a sister? Can you see her? This blonde woman with blue eyes. She stands in the shadow of the door for a while before going to stand in the shadow of her mother. Is she trying to capture loss fleeing uncontrollably? Is she trying to have the resilience found in nature? Is she meeting her emptiness? Is she cruel and comforting? Perhaps she is sucking the last juice of a sugar cane Perhaps she is krumping. Perhaps she is twerking…slowly... A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes and blonde hair of a little white girl. What if this becomes a study in being seen, What if the filter comes off? How can I harness the displacing I did as a younger me into the displacement of falling. Of falling through time. Slowing down a fall into a slide. I am being purposefully opaque. What if the space of a fall is one of dissonance and disconnect - The pop of skin The popstar empowerment The pop of pressure released The pop of a puncture? Of pop empowerment. The fall of the pound The fall of a building next door The fall up some stairs The fall of the global north Under its own arrogance Haunted by the ghost of the girl I used to be I am waiting for my spine to cascade I’m still trying for everything to be allowed Is she trying to capture loss fleeing uncontrollably? Is she trying to have the resilience found in nature? Perhaps she is krumping. Perhaps she is twerking…slowly Does it happen right away Something like a sense of resistance. Something to lock your body into as if locking into the cosmos, the portals of time, an organic spaceship. A little ghost came A little light gets in She is steady, she has feet She is steady she has feet In a movement study, she is orientating herself around an absence. Why is the absence her centre? Where did her power go? This ghost of her These ghosts of them Where is she without them? She feels like she flies apart She will fly, she will fly apart at any moment, any given moment, she will fly apart They are far away, she is far away but she has feet and she’s steady, no more jittering, no more just doing, no more need for doubt. The yearning of blonde beauty is a horrific freefall. She loses her mind. A free fall awash with indigo oceans, indigo galaxies of questions to slip through. They cannot be outrun like the threat of oncoming traffic. It’s part of the fun never knowing where the swerving aircurrents will take your body next. Later…somehow… she lands and is able to truly leave the yearning in some other place. The day before she found out they had truly left each other, she lay next to her memory of them and she let them go. They were spooning their memory - her memory of them. Them and her bodies lay spooned together. She felt the memory of their arm laced around her and she shifted away, and she let them go. --------- Written and then woven into sound for a 10 minute solo as part of Hagit Yakira's Sadler's Wells WildCard, October 2016.

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feministshakedown-blog · 8 years ago

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Small thoughts on work by self-identifying women of colour

I’m in Edinburgh and I’m seeing shows to ‘diagnose’ as part of The Sick Of The Fringe. I’m meeting new faces and being reminded that one of the freedoms that being paid (a bit) to be up here is that I can seek out shows around my more organised schedule.

I’m in need of comfort you see. I need a return to listening to narratives that connect with me and I think work by self-identifying women of colour will be my tonic. I don’t need to ‘like’ the work but I need to be present with it. I need to feel my body present with these women. A body that will see them. A body that will feel with them.

I will dutifully place my body in the service of these women’s work. I will witness the ways, physicalities, emotional labour, articulations and forms that many in the arts still refuse to make space for. Throughout my goings about in the UK as an artist/whatever, I usually see work for a variety of reasons; I do it for my own curiosity and learning, I do it for these artists and I do it to let venues know - even if only in financial terms - that the work is needed.

At the moment, I am doing it for me.

I need to be reminded that I’m not crazy and that I am not blind. Like enacting a spell by writing it down, I need to evidence that work by women of colour actually exists regardless of how many tales I hear along the lines of ‘no one applied for the role’ ‘no one sent in an application’ ‘no one came to mind to programme’.

I may disagree with the form that this work by self-identifying women of colour takes. I won’t understand all of it. Some devices may be problematic. But I need it. I need it in a way that moves past the need for representation although I haven’t got the language for what I mean by that yet.

I need to seek out this work because unfortunately, what I see happening around me in majority white venues, festivals and curations, calls on me to lock into a resilient mass of emotion shouting out that this work exists. I see defensiveness, fragility and an assumption that the PoC in the group or at the meeting has time to advise, educate and re-traumatise themselves with anecdotes where tangible (often spoken) racism happened. In some ways, I need this work because I want to live.

I want to live in fluid and multi-directional motions rather than hurtle backwards to re-visit pain. I want time to develop myself and the language I have to articulate the now overused but still frequently misinterpreted ‘politics of identity’. I am no longer interested in being employed to loop back to god knows when…to have to explain or to have my body dance through the politics I have lived through which it feels like majority white arts spaces are only just catching up to.

I want to fly. I feel like I haven’t flown in ages.

I was at some lovely friends BBQ and Get Out came up. All the white folk wanted my take on it. I said I liked it but was really unsettled by all its reminders and the conversations I had with a black man after we had watched the film together made me sad. I didn’t really get to say all that because there were incessant interruptions by white folk saying how much they liked it. How fun it was. How right on it all was. It seemed to me that they were so eager to share with me that they had got all the jokes and therefore all the impacts of racism too. I felt unable to say that this scenario wouldn’t have been out of place in the film they were lauding…I saw their fragility, how fragile the whole situation was, and I did not want to break it. To do so would have outcast myself and I wanted to remain close to them.

However, I felt like I have felt on many occasions this year - that these conversations are great, that they are important but that I do not need to be in the room. If I do not need to be in the rooms that I spent my twenties chasing the power and kudos to get into, what happens now?

I do not know and so I am seeking solace in others (un)like me who might show me how they are coping, making, standing, resting, caring and seeking.

------

I am using the term 'self-identifying' because I don't want to presume I know the gender identities of the performers I see. I mean it to include cis and trans women and genderfluid people. If I am using the term too broadly to the damage of others please let me know.

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feministshakedown-blog · 8 years ago

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A Collage

I am startled by light. Startled into light. Startled onto light.

Things are clearer closer up - the sound of birds wings flapping gives a sense of satisfaction. Car engines feel like a shame, personalised number plates overly brash and manicured lawns are puzzling. Alone with a million trees. Giant oaks lean over and reprimand her for her ignorance, for her mistakes, for underestimating the seriousness of her predicament. They point at her with snaking sclerotic arms. Of course, she knows such humanising of alien trees is wrong but this is a human-made place. It is all about humans. Humans’ previous actions niggle.

Dear mother, dear kitchen, dear time, dear Roosevelt, dear growing up,

I cannot

I cannot consider

I cannot consider living

I cannot consider living immaculately

I will not

I will not tidy

I know

I know there is

I know there is a collection

I know there is a collection of me

I will not

I will not have it

I do not

I do not want

I do not want your

I do not want your shiny efforts

She stands in the shadow of the door for a while before going to stand in the shadow of her mother. Both figures, one green, one darker bend over a book. A collage of pages fanning out with newspaper clippings, food diaries, school grades and IQ tests.

I wish to

I wish to know

I wish to know exactly

I wish to know exactly why we bleed into one another

If only these were them! Perfect twin pillars!!

Human puppets and dancing doppelgängers. We recommend the use of soft rhythmic music to aid the movement. You can only do it in a critical window period. Parenthood. Or… learning how to handle and carefully manipulate another human body (she nods towards the church).

She wished her voice hadn’t swallowed itself. If it ever unfurled, if it ever roared, she’d be able to keep her cool and maintain composure, Keep her Distance and Keep her Options Open, Depersonalise and Shift from Reactive to Proactive

Written 15th August 2016. Dug up 18th August 2017

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feministshakedown-blog · 8 years ago

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Timelines

I realise (2017) that I began dancing on stage (2000) to taste taking up space without hindrance. At the time, I was dancing because someone had noticed me and unlike the later noticing (2004) that made my body freeze and my insides hurry to fold in on themselves cell by cell, this noticing involved making spaces that I could flesh out for and with myself.

A small play house (1992) was also a space I held for myself. It was made from the crates used to transport my parent’s furniture from London to Nairobi (this detail emerged August 2017), and I would sit, and twirl and play within it. A hinged blue door gave me the permission to decide who could enter and who could not.

I discovered (2000) that there were many spaces I was able to take up when dancing. My inner world and my body’s surface were mine and although I hadn’t learnt yet that others might question my right over these physical, psychological and body spaces, I think I was on the brink of seeing a future where these things would be revealed and have their impacts. My senses must have been on the edge of transitioning because from then on, dancing and tasting its freedom was something I actively sought out; spurred on (at first unconsciously and then consciously) by the complex environment of white supremacist patriarchy that was insisting I was not free.

I understand freedom as a loaded, impossible space and refrained from using it or uselessly pursuing it (2014 onwards). Instead, I choose the spaces and relief and expansion of undoing. There is joy in this and there is toughness.

(Circa 1993) These spaces wouldn’t always be free but right now, I feel them as such and take a leap. A leap made up of fearlessness.

Leaping

A moment caught in time. Caught in my leap into soft soft grass. My rubber knees, 6 years old and bouncy, would land me. Spongy like a young cat.

The garden is vast.

And the warmth.

And the rain that bought with it these bugs I have forgotten the name of.

Swarms of them all over the kitchen floor, writhing lost, shiny-brown and wet.

They’d be cooked and eaten.

I would marvel.

2011. I wrote about moving to London in 1994. I didn’t know this was a rupture but later realise that I experienced it as such.

2017. Would I know this freedom again? I ask myself as I look at these photos (early 1990s).

1993 I run headstrong into a swimming pool thinking that I can swim and have to be fished out with a large net by a thin, wiry and strong man. The water slops around on the stone pale brown-yellow tiles.

Coming out of the water, my hair long and wet down my back without the later memory (1998) that would associate the same sensation of wet hair down my back with numbness. I guess I was ‘free’ from time because time hadn’t really happened yet. Time had been supportively rolling on (1991) rather than forcing sharp changes in direction (2015).

So I leapt (1993) off the veranda covered with green foliage; ivy vines claiming ownership over the brickwork. Languidly roaming and depositing their sticky roots as they saw fit… I moved up, propelled myself forward and for a moment, I hung in the air - my arms outstretched above my head, the front of my body soft, relaxed, in place, enjoying the air moving past me as it needed to. I imagine (2017) that I leapt seeing the ground but not knowing what would happen within the moments of suspension.

I was at the equator (1992) with a jumper wrapped around my arm that I would press to my lips for comfort (1989-1994). Cotton still feels good (2017). In the photo at the equator, there is a view behind me of greenery meeting sky. The space is endless for me. Green, luscious, endless prickly hedges. Soft grass hooked into dry earth. The photos catch me (1992) rather than me catching them with a pose (2000). Trying to control my image.

Unshakeable nostalgia at these images that speak of home and displacement. Emotions with roots that I cannot remember or place (2017).

These are images where I am leaning in to the lens, unafraid of being caught and trapped. Self-consciousness has yet to filter down into my bones like a mildly corrosive substance that leaves me brittle. My eyes engage rather than turn away downwards (2008, 2011, 2015, 2015 again, 2016).

A friend tells me I look free when I dance (2017).

Written in part during rehearsals for The Body Archive Project by Alice Tatge

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feministshakedown-blog · 8 years ago

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Open Call

Scroll down for clearer text below the flyer…

Open Call

I’m looking for voluntary submissions from artists working within any discipline for a book I’d like to then edit.

I’ve been grappling for the longest time with experiences of sexist, racist and sexual violence and I while I am actively engaging with healing, moving on is a long journey. And so, a book - to document and to shift.

The content can be anything you want to get up and out into the world so that its no longer with you and you don’t have to carry it. Anything you’d like to charge up and expel. Or put into a collective body-document so that you don’t feel that whatever it is, is yours to carry alone. The content can be any format so long as it can be captured on the page - poems, one liners, fiction, non-fiction, lists, comics, illustrations, scripts, excerpts, photographs, video stills…anything. It will be black and white to keep costs down. I’ll sell the book with all profits going to a charity that helps and supports women who have experienced sexual violence.

Some broad outlines or starting points:

Decolonisation of body, of territory

Dancing

A body made public (through performance)

A body made private

Rage

Love

Fearlessness

Vulnerability

Dreams

Imagination

‘Soft’ forms of resistance

‘Hard’ forms of resistance

Safety

Morphing

Sex

Futurism

To register your interest please email me at [email protected]

I’ll then get back to you with more details and timelines etc.

Also, if you’d like to help in other ways, i.e. proof reading, printing and distribution, please do get in touch.

Are you in? I hope so!

Alexandrina x

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feministshakedown-blog · 8 years ago

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Yesterday’s News

I started this article 16th April 2016. Now in Feb 2017, I’ll endeavour to finish it…Yesterday’s News finally written today.

16th April 2016

I picked up a Sunday paper’s supplement a while a go and the feature article was an account of body dysmorphia affecting teenagers. It interviewed a teenager and her mum alongside a profile of a mental health centre offering a short stay and a course of cognitive behavioural therapy as treatment for the teen.

The front cover of the magazine was of a white-but-a-bit-Barbie-tanned blond woman with her face airbrushed to remove all her facial features. She was a wash of immaculate white skin. The same kind of airbrushed skin that can be found on the legs, arms, lips and chins of however many models in however many countless images. The texture of the airbrushing carried aspirational associations because of where and how it is applied elsewhere to sell images of human beauty.

It was a similar image to this:

It was a jarring and uncomfortable image and I’m sure that this was the intended effect of the editors. However, the most piercing and upsetting effect was that through reading the article, I found out that the teenager being interviewed was mixed-race.

Dot. Dot. Dot. Open mouth. Dot. Sense of fuckery. Dot. Dot. Vomit inside. Dot. Dot. Dot. Cry for all. Dot. Dot.

The editors made a huge oversight or gesture of not seeing. No, not a gesture - that may wrongly imply a process of consideration. They were not actually hearing - fully hearing - the teenager’s tale so that her language may filter down and pierce their own privileges. They were representing her story by giving it the centre feature, but not enacting the knowledge gained by her bravery. They were making space but filling the space with the same bullshit that people of colour have to process where white speaks for non-white.

The bullshit we have to confront. It is an enforced warfare of confrontation. Forced into the position of being confrontational because of being confronted with whitewashes all the time. Being made to feel uncomfortable because information being relayed to you is telling you that you are doing uncomfortable things.

I wonder whether I need to lodge a formal complaint to The Observer on Sunday?

Complaint: Racism

Perpetuating the kind of white privilege that cancels out its own recognition of white privilege.

Complaint: Misinformation

I have never read that body dysmorphia includes the person experiencing an erasure of their features. Perhaps I would say instead that absence of self perception is present…

I identified with this teenager’s experiences. For me, every day involves multiple checking's of my appearance - mostly my face - to see its hideous monstrosity and figure out how I am going to deal with it today. Will I look at myself in the eyes or is it too hard this hour? So, perhaps sideways glances are all I can bear. At Laban, with the mirrors, I would look down at my feet or past my face into the distance - suppressing, or actively un-seeing my ugliness. I had the same gaze in a ballet class I took last week. My appearance can shock myself. Sometimes I recoil, sometimes I flinch. Sometimes I am surprised if what I see is bearable. I have learnt (somewhere - who knows where or how) to disregard comments on my beauty. It isn’t even conscious anymore but a harsh dismissal of other people’s words as lies. And coupled with that, any fleeting sense I might have that I am beautiful is a lie and I judge myself to be a fraud.

Have I been diagnosed with body dysmorphia? No. Something about the way I present myself in the chairs of doctors or psychiatrists seems to disagree. My ugliness is seen as laughable (actual, vocalised laughter) by partners and carer giving figures/doctors alike. For the better part of nineteen years.

My cells have renewed themselves countless times over this same time period but the indelible patterning of shame has remained. By now, my shame knows exactly how to perpetuate itself and my language habitually buries itself, feeling foolish and battle-worn all over again, again, again.

Sometimes it is a diagnosis that I think may help me shape and articulate my experiences. The anchor of a label or a community. Most of the time, I am relieved to no longer have these medical professionals any part of information I get about my identity. But I am still in two minds as to whether labelling will help me by giving me information that I am believed. I can rationally know that my view of myself is a distorted one and who am I to assign language to my experiences when others supposedly with more knowledge and insight haven’t seen or heard what I speak of?

Coming to understand that the systematic onslaught of images of women whose skin colour and features are ones I need to continuously leap reality in order connect to**, have been part of tapestry in my perceptions of my own ugliness has been its own journey of sadness. An anger too at being weakened by something I did not choose, kind of like a victim of my eyes. It’s disgusting and what do you do?

Well, I smile too much to compensate. To disguise, to misdirect those who may think me ugly, to signal that I’m not as hideous as I perceive. It’s a kind of perverse second-guessing. It makes me untrustworthy to some. I smile even when I am sad. Or when I have pissed someone off and they are looking for an explanation. Or when I am fighting with a friend of lover. It is a scary thing to feel your physiology shift beyond your control. And absurd to know that the resulting smile is a smile of frozen fear. The body thinks it is protecting you. But it is misplaced. And it is misused.

I made a dance piece called ‘One Nubian For The Boys’ last year. The responses were difficult for me. There was feedback of various kinds that it was ‘extreme’, some said ‘disturbing’. These comments made me feel incredibly isolated. I was trying to communicate a specific experience. One of the things I was trying to process in making the work was to challenge myself to look at my image for more than a minute. But communicating this motivation (in language outside of the work itself) would have brought more questions than I was comfortable asking. So I tried to engage with the idea that perhaps work was extreme or disturbing instead. But it isn’t! I cannot see it that way! what I continue to come back to is the extent to which these comments failed to recognise the viewers position - i.e. they felt disturbed not that the work was inherently disturbing. Or that my experience as a mixed race woman was in ‘extreme’ contrast to their experience as a white man…Is having your experience being labeled as extreme a form of gas lighting? I certainly began to doubt myself and the space I took up with a 5 minute video. How dare I? And if only we could have spoken about the vulnerability underneath. If only you could have looked at me, with me, instead of render my image as so polar opposite to you. So unsettling. Perhaps it was…

I did wonder with a friend if part of the disturbance felt was because I did not smile. But unpicking that is for another blogpost. And also once I have made a physical response (working title ‘Save The Children From Twerking’).

15th Feb 2017 (flex the writing muscle)

Something does need to get cleaned off of me. Making my body public is hard work. It’s a perverse occupation considering how debilitating my anxiety can be. How alone I can feel within it. How this mental health difficulty I experience can feel as unspeakable as racism. This is not a pity party but I’m trying to taste what ‘unashamed’ might be.

The disgust I feel is a place that overstuns me and I know that it is also a symptom of the systematic erasure of non-white, non-dominant cultures that makes me want to be blind - want not to see my own face.

And then the article layered a brutal truth - the mixed race woman’s story is not going to be visually represented. It will be unidentifiable, replaced with an image that is alien but everywhere. It will be made a mockery of. Don’t go telling your story because it will be unrepresentable or it will be twisted, morphed - just as I/the teenager/other sufferers from body dysmorphia morph ourselves, a larger structure will morph us. It starts at the editors desk and works its way into our consciousness - meeting, plaiting and binding with all the other strands of oppression.

With Project O (my on-going supernova collaboration with Jamila Johnson-Small), we are making a long durational work called Voodoo. We performed recently at In Between Time Festival and the week before, I was incredibly panicked about being seen for so long (the show is currently performed in two 2 hour loops - i.e. 4 hours a night). But I couldn’t speak this fear because it felt like failure. Also because I knew there was something important about engaging with being seen for so long. I am unquestionably drawn to performance and to embodying the politics of how important it is that bodies (like mine?) are seen within the matrix of majority white privileged visibility. I will protect the space I and others have carved out for dance and performance to reveal complexities of experience like a lioness protecting her pride. To ensure that experiences are heard, that our stories are written into the fabric of history. My presence is needed urgently. And I will be there as part of the vanguard (screw my fear of arrogance). And there is the paradox. Of wanting to disappear but knowing how important it is that I stay. Artists like Zinzi Minott have voiced that we are dying out, that artists of colour are buckling and looking around for support with self-care. I may also drop away for a while, a breath, a lie in, a long over due catch up with family and friends, a look inwards before returning to movement and to words.

I think of performance/dancing as a site where I can hook in to the morphing I experience as part of my reality - plug in and emit all the everything that shapes my body (and my imagination) moment to moment. Instead of destruction, the same deepening tunnel of dread I can feel when I look into the vortex of a mirror fuels something from the same source (me) but altogether different. Resilience? Wholeness? The strength to grapple? Moving past paralysis?

There is space within this work for healing. It is not the dominant narrative - by now, I distrust dominant anything. It is a part. A rare space that doesn’t exist too often. I haven’t really accepted how long I have lived with an image of myself that swells, twists, becomes unspeakably, literally nauseating. As I become aware of how deep the damage gets, I don’t know what it means for performing, for being in front of people, for going to meetings, for going the shops, for being asked to be in a photograph like its no big deal. I don’t know. I have been pretending that all these asks are ok. They don’t feel ok. I perform their ok-ness because it is what I am expected to do. I am grateful for many things. As I said, this isn’t a place where pity has a home.

It is something that has been on my mind and seeing that article threw me into a space where I realised what I was pretending, what I was battling was - upsettingly part of a larger war to make diverse ranges of narratives visible.

Thank you for reading

**I understand that for white women there is also a gap that needs to be crossed and causes its own damage. I do want to insist that the dominance of white skin tones almost everywhere in the UK makes the leap for people of colour a larger one and therefore the potential for severance from self-worth that bit more potent.

Image credit: Thomas Northcut and GNM Imaging

#dance #mental health #race #racism #white privilege

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feministshakedown-blog · 9 years ago

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Short talk for ‘Dance, Diaspora and the role of the Archive’; A conference by State Of Emergency in partnership with Society for Dance Research, University of Bedfordshire

As I am sure has been covered much today, in one way or another, archives and archivists are not impartial, neutral or objective. I think that archives have the power to make memory and the power to withhold or forget memories.

Archivists Joan M Schwartz and Terry Cook have written that archives ‘have been about power – about maintaining power, about the power of the present to control what is, and will be known about the past, about the power of remembering over forgetting’ (2002, p.3).

What if you are being forgotten daily? What are you losing daily?

Building up my knowledge of black dance and archives feels a daunting and heavy place. A heavy place sometimes best ignored because it is too vast and I lack too much. The lacking is felt and both my fault and the fault of those before me.

Imagining a past, my past, the any pasts of all of us, feels ungraspable. There is a scene in Samuel Delany’s 1966 sci-fi novel Babel-17 where an uptight male Customs Officer meets a ‘discorporate’ - this is a being who has died but can still exist, and able to hold more information than a ‘corporate’ living human…comes in handy for navigating the cosmos but can leave a living human with an impossible task…The passage is them meeting…

And she moved closer to him, her hair holding the recalled odor [sic] of. And the sharp transparent features reminding him of. And more words from her, now, making him laugh….And her interruption was a word or a kiss or a frown or a smile, sending not humour through him now, but luminous amazement, fear, excitement; and the feel of her shape against his completely new. He fought to retain it, pattern of pressure and pressure, fading as the pressure itself faded. She was going away. She was laughing like, as though, as if. He stood, losing her laughter, replaced by whirled bewilderment in the times of his consciousness fading -

…memories of, of. (pp.39-40)

I like this passage. It seems geared towards the production of a feeling or a doubt rather than an object or certainty - much like the live performance that interests me does.

What I also like about this passage and what stuck with me is the way the language relishes in it’s incompleteness and how that directly reflects or empathises with the characters own inability to hold on to memory.

I have been thinking of memory as a symbolic version of myself further back in time. A time I can draw on that is beyond my ‘real’ lifetime.

Because the archives of people of colour are insufficient, my ability to conjure up these memories, falters and stalls. My imagination is rendered incomplete. I suggest that I can only imagine what someone before me has already known…? Or already traced…?

The amnesia concerning black dance in the UK is by definition more than the personal encounter - like in the Delany passage. It is a social - at times deliberate - forgetting. It leaves a collective searching in its wake. It is a searching that misleads. It is a searching that certain groups of people realise and engage with and/but is a searching within all of us on some level. Those who have benefited from the privileging of information or history over others, and those who have not, all lack the complete picture. None of us are even close.

I will be talking in absolutes today I guess. Positing myself as myself, as everyone, as no-one…I can never quite articulate the sense I have that personal experiences are because of/within/entangled with socio/political/economic frameworks and so any perception I have of myself sits alongside context like a permanent fate. I will use the terminology person or people of colour because at the moment, it is a definition that my tongue doesn’t rebel at.

I had many versions of this talk in my head. One was an idea to find something a female person of colour based in the Uk, and making dance work in the ‘50s or ‘60s said or wrote or was recorded saying. I would find this passage and then ask female dance makers (or those involved in dance’s dissemination - academics/producers) to record themselves saying the words and send me the audio file. I would then compile these contemporary voices into one ode to the past.

I was going to ask:

Vicki Igbokwe

Alessandra Seutin

Jenny Williams

Jamila Johnson-Small

Zinzi Minott

Rebecca Ubuntu

Pauline Myers

Mercy Nabirye

Patricia Okenwa

Sharon Watson

Deborah Badoo

Tia-Monique Uzor

Jessica Walker

Pam Johnson

Tracy Gentles

Greta Mendez

I started searching for a primary or secondary source. I couldn’t find any.

Admittedly, it was a series of google searches rather than libraries. But much can be found in a quick google search and the fact that I couldn’t find any I think is pertinent. I did find some men. But no women. Some ballerinas performing in the 40s but they were from the US not the UK. I found a female voice in Abinna Manning, a soul girl in the 1970s who - as part of interviews on UK club culture, recalled dancing to Van McCoy’s The Hustle saying, ‘There were some really good dancers who could command the whole dance floor. They were mostly boys and we would always move over to let them perform.’ (Farley & Galloway, 2015)

I had another idea…

I found things that celebrities of colour had said about their own legacy - e.g. Muhammed Ali, Oprah, Beyoncé….Maybe Beyoncé IS legacy (but that’s a whole other conversation)!

Another idea:

Composing single sentences broken up over the course of 10 minutes. The gaps, the silences larger and more prominent than the content, or even the voice of a person of colour.

But I thought that might be quite frustrating to listen to. And as much as it is frustrating to have to have an event separate from other (white) discourses around dance archive - an archive that is so fleshy and full and often led by choreographers themselves, I didn’t fancy making people feel frustrated this afternoon.

Anyways, cultural forgetting can happen very quickly.

Something I did find in my search was the dance festival Hip. Hip was noted by londondance.com as ‘one of the few Black dance festivals in the UK’ (unknown,2003). Instigated by Brenda Edwards, Hip ran from 32000 and I think until 2003 but I am not sure…

I was shocked that I didn’t know about this festival. I was saddened by how quickly it faded from my sense of collective memory. Up until now it hasn’t been part of my imaginings of London in the early 2000s. I miss it and I wasn’t even there!

The last dates I could find for Hip was 18th – 30th November 2003 and it was programmed at The Place.

What has a London venue done for contemporary dance since? I almost wrote, ‘What has a London venue done for BLACK contemporary dance since?’, but thought ‘No! Fuck that!’ Enough with separation and announcing differences that shouldn’t matter. Missing out the voices of people of colour does a disservice to the entire field and separating out ‘black’ choreography from ‘white’ choreography just makes me angry and I don’t have time in my day for that at the moment. (Maybe in January I can be angry again.)

What I am, and what asks like this one from Deborah Baddoo, to speak here at an event around black dance and archive, confront me with is is a big old gap. A big old gap onto of a big old gap laid upon another gap which, mockingly falls into another gap. It’s exactly the kind of gap the establishment and the white supremacist patriarchy build their empires on. The foundations are laid on bones and ghosts. Thankfully, bones disintegrate…ghosts aren’t all there. One day the foundations will fall.

I imagine this gap like looking into a deep vacuum….It’s like looking into a vacuum while knowing in an alternative universe some place without a human hunger to divide and order power, the same vacuum is instead full of stories. So the experience is one of feeling all the erasure of all those stories while at the same time feeling these stories never existed for you. Its a painful, glitchy paradox full of presence and absence.

To return to Delany’s unfortunate Customs Officer:

‘The emptiness of his theft recollections was as real as any love loss.’ (1966, p.40).

This loss, this amnesia filters down into the very personal impact of not being able to see yourself/myself from when I was born in London. From second one, when I came out of the womb so white, the nurses didn’t believe my Nigerian mother was my mother. My heritage ignorantly, casually but indelibly unseen, unbelieved, forgotten.

I wish to express a vulnerability amidst all the stuff of history. All the endeavour and wish for a solid, sold history. A place or rather many places to anchor ourselves in time. To learn about ourselves by properly documenting our past. I guess underneath this is how?

I wanted to conclude with some other questions:

Can we recover a past?

If we are so seldom written about, or what is written about is more often than not contained within notions of ‘blackness’, where are we going to expand to?

Whose responsibility is it to keep records? An individual artist? Or does this add to an already exhausting list of things to be concerned with when trying to live with care and make work…

We already curate so much digitally, information is in abundance and identities, gestures, trends, travel across geographic borders and at such speed. We engage with and emit projections and symbols of the self. Photographic documentation is unimaginably vast, you can confirm your opinion by typing into google and the internet will reflect back a community…So then, does the archive as a resource for presenting clear, temporally linear narratives cancel itself out? Is a sense of development or progress important anymore? How do you archive complexity?

What about an archive where different knowledges and numerous histories aren’t in competition?

What if alongside concerning ourselves with archiving a history already forgotten, we build an archive as a place to share strategies for coping with this erasure?

Maybe amidst all these traces and lack of traces we can invoke Grace Jones in Corporate Cannibal (2008) singing, “You can’t trace my footsteps as I walk the other way”[1]

Perhaps black dance archives can morph, just as she morphs, undefinable, crossing genres, disrupting, controlling the objectification of our bodies and knowingly exposing the power plays we know we are a part of, in order to transform into our own kind of other?

Thank you

——-

References

Schwartz, J. M. & Cook, T. (2002) Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Netherlands.

Delany, S. (1966) Babel-17. Ace Books, New York.

Farley, T. & Galloway, R.. 2015. The Dancers: In Their Own Words An oral history of the forgotten dancers that set London on fire in the late ’70s. [ONLINE] Available at: http://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2015/09/the-dancers-in-their-own-words. [Accessed 4 September 2016].

londondance.com. (2003) News: Hip 2003. [ONLINE] Available at: http://londondance.com/articles/news/hip-2003-id-290/. [Accessed 4 September 2016].

‘Dance, Diaspora and the role of the Archive’ conference took place on Saturday 17th September 2016

——-

[1] See Uri McMillan’s short essay “‘You Can’t Trace My Footsteps As I Walk The Other Way’: Grace Jones, Black Camp, and the Aesthetics of Slipperiness” in Black Portraiture[s] II: Imaging the Black Body and Re-staging Histories (2015) for a detailed analysis of Jones’ aesthetics within this music video.

#dance #archive #disaspora #stateofemergency

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feministshakedown-blog · 9 years ago

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British Museum We Don’t Believe You various origins, various materials and various voices, (London, 27th November 2015)

I made the mistake of going to the Room 25 of the British Museum. And then some time later, I decided to take my mother there. And some months later still, I took a group of artists to join me in my empty, hopeful search. As I introduced the first task and everyone set about their way navigating the desolate basement space, my mother informed me - in the way that only a parent could - that I looked like I was about to pass out.

Let’s take a look around a space founded in 1753. A space where artefacts from the country of Egypt occupy entire floors and artefacts from the continent of Africa are lack lustrously displayed in three ill-lit rooms.

Descend into Room 25 with me and find Africa represented as a place without music, literature, chitchat, television, pens, shoes and cutlery. A place that the West ‘discovered’ rather than encountered. A place where many of the worn artefacts’ only narrative is that they hold a particular sheen that has fascinated and excited western art collectors. A place with only one undated photograph of an unnamed Congolese woman as an illustration of what an African might look like. A place where objects can only be dated in centuries rather than specific dates even though upstairs in Ancient Greek Sculpture, the dating is far more accurate. Yes, Ancient Greece has many large, lofty rooms dedicated solely to sculpture. Africa has three rooms dedicated to the whole continent, which of course means the rooms are dedicated to absolutely nothing about Africa.

Come be confused with me as we encounter a space without any geographic sense of curation, a place where the majority of artefacts are behind glass cabinets and kind of put together like an antique market instead of spaciously organised and displayed on mighty plinths. A place where two stolen, ivory leopards are reflected back to the viewing public as being “kindly donated by HRH Queen Elizabeth II”. A place where it was believed that sacred stools should not be left unoccupied, un-sat-on or unattended for then a spirit will place itself there, and yet, the sacred stool we see before us has indeed been left unoccupied, un-sat-on and unattended. In this act of documenting a belief and then displaying the object without any regard for these beliefs, the spirituality of whomever this stool belonged - for we do not know - has been violently and offensively dismissed as superstitious and false.

“Alex, you look like you are about to pass out”

To our left we see school children eagerly drawing Benin brass plaques. They are learning all the wrong things.

I eavesdrop on an older Nigerian gentleman standing by a crude map of Africa asking a British Museum member of staff if there is detailed map of West Africa that illustrates what the geography and borders were before and after colonisation. During this short conversation, he uses the terms ‘colonial, colonies and colonialisation’ more times than are written on the information boards throughout the entire collection.

The roundabout answer to his enquiries is ‘no’. There is no detailed map. There is no detailed history. There is no visible accountability for Britain’s role in the West Africa Conference of 1884 that divided up Africa into most of the countries we know of today.

There is however, something painful for me in this exchange. There is something disrespectful and embarrassing about the Museum’s failure to serve an older man who is simply asking for a representation of what his lands look like.

I realise my folly at simply assuming that with age - i.e the passing of time - can come knowledge and wisdom. As if time is unmarked by power and agendas. I watch this black elder stoop to ask a white stranger - a pseudo-guardian of Room 25 for evidence, for an illustration, for a map, of where he comes from. My blood itches as I am faced with the tangible outcome of systematic racisms and cover ups that continue to deny straight forward access to non Eurocentric histories.

“Well, there is a study room but you will have to go upstairs to the information desk, ask for such and such member of staff and then make an appointment”

Why is the work his to do? Why can’t this information be at our fingertips? Why can’t I recall the year when British troops stole the royal treasures of Benin in 1897 as easily as I can recall the year 1066? Why is Google more transparent about historical fact than this sham of a public resource?

I have taken a group of artists into an incompetent space that lets us all down at every turn.

I set a task to go round the collection as a group and to stop whenever we have a problem. We don’t get very far.

Come leave this place with me in an utterly, deflated daze. I promise that the afternoon will be different.

With thanks to Marion Burge, Seke Chimutengwende, Vivian Ezuga, Ria Hartley, Patse Hemsley, Julia Keenan, Rudy Loewe, Sheba Montserrat, and Yolanda Victoria

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feministshakedown-blog · 9 years ago

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“The Magnitude of Small Spaces” Or “I saw the future and it was dark” Or “A writing exercise in trying not to blame myself for my culturally ingrained passivity”

I want to talk about small spaces. I want to zoom in to the subtle, the nuanced, the impossibly small and complicated. I want to touch how much volume there is in these present yet unavailable to the naked eye spaces.

I have performed O since 2012. I will perform it many more times this year and in years to come. O is the first time I have physically reclaimed the spaces and permissions that have been denied me since I first heard a racist comment.

There is a section in O where Jamila Johnson-Small and I stand in colourful bob wigs with the Primark tag left in, thongs which are either leopard print with a small diamante bow or pink with lace, and black boots. During this moment, we each ask 2-3 audience members to paint us black. As mixed race women, the ask is a risk for both audience and ourselves. Whenever we ask this of the audience, there is a palpable sense of asking, ‘what are we going to be responsible for creating together?’

The ask is understandably met with hesitancy, discomfort, care and obligation. Audiences vary in the amount of paint they apply and where the paint is applied.

On 9th December 2015 whilst performing this section, my breasts were groped, paint was flicked all over me, fingers ran beneath the curves of my flesh and my nipples were repeatedly poked. The touch was one of entitled menace and creative delight on the part of the audience member. This assault was carried out by a white man with white hair and a sing song voice.

At first I smiled. A perverse tool I use to disassociate from traumatic experiences and threats.

I got a grip on myself and re-entered my body and ran through exactly what was happening.

I grew very afraid for a moment and then I froze. Another tool I use to disassociate from traumatic experiences and threats.

I was not able to protect myself.

Thankfully Jamila stepped in.

I have dedicated 10 years to performing. The work I do is important. The personal political and global politics are great fuel for me. My relationship to dance has empowered and shifted my relationship to my body and to myself. Throughout family dramas, early sexual assault, broken hearts, betrayals, emotional manipulations, anger at hidden histories, dismay at systematic oppressions, and the exhaustion of hustling for a voice, a space, a sense of wellness that is always balanced with the odds stacked against the ‘othered’ - I have been able to find and shape a place for myself in dance. And where I haven’t yet found the space, I feel supported and driven enough to negotiate and experiment.

Importantly, this space has felt safe(ish) and it feels more or less like my own. I have built connections with many communities and been mindful of which situations to present my work in. I have learnt from exploitative situations and bent my path accordingly: using my voice, using my body, using my friendship.

Jamila and I have worked full-time on a collaboration that seeks to give us agency and a certain amount of compositional control both on stage in our various performances and off stage as we negotiate with partners or write applications. It is an agency and control that I do not have in my everyday, walking down the street, life. It is rare and I value it enormously and get a lot of confidence from these actions

On the night of 9th December, all this belief and work and experience was futile. All this was dust and I was a child. My breasts were putty playthings. I was less than a canvas, less than an art object. I was somebody’s frighteningly still and passive point of nothingness to fill with their own pleasure.

That night, the personal cost of my work felt too great.

Having a craft and practice as a choreographer and performer has felt like the one space I somehow enjoy being in. I enjoy the fight of it, the way I think in it, the challenges and the unpredictability of it. In that way, the boundary around this space is completely precious to me.

Zooming in from that space, the small spaces of contract and consent between audience and performer are also precious. I am watched. You watch and are also seen. You pay money and I am paid. Our relationship is a dynamic and live one. Certain permissions are given. At other times, provocations enter the space. My exposure invites your exposure, my discomfort meets your own.

I consented to be touched whilst naked. I opened a consensual space but within that space there is a small space which does not hold consent. A space that is surrounded by a precious boundary, one which on so many occasions is flexible, up for academic debate and negotiable. But I did not consent to this kind of passing of that intimate boundary.

Go unwanted into the small space beyond this boundary and everything blows apart and everything is damaged. I did not ask or agree to unwanted sexual contact.

And yet, in the days afterwards, my brain like the dumb culturally ingrained hunk of meat that it is, tempts me with the narrative of I was asking for it…I put myself there.

This space right here is an open letter to contemporary dance and live art performance to ask how and what next? Because when it comes down to it, I feel ruined and ashamed of my silence. I cannot utter a word. Performance, my only remaining boundary was completely violated in front of laughing (titilated or uncomfortable) people. All complicit.

Something is so very wrong with all of us.

My last shred of naivety has been painfully and shockingly stripped away. Now I feel like giving the whole thing up. I am very embarrassed and overwhelmed with sadness.

Since this my breasts haven’t felt like mine.

Since this I have tried hard to stay present in the loving touch of my boyfriend.

Since this I have wanted to book myself into surgery to have my breasts removed.

Since this I have wanted to cut my breasts off myself.

Since this I have been lost.

Since this, the magnitude of small spaces floors me.

Human being’s callousness and disregard for one another’s boundaries has been destroying me since longer than I care to detail, since all the needless wars, since migration, since Columbus, since the night of December 9th in a show I love.

People are animals. Rolling in shit. Don’t fucking touch me. At an industry party, in a show, in the street, on the tube. Don’t fucking touch me. In bed, via an email, in a club, at a festival.

The woman who was also painting me while the assault was happening, exclaimed at one point “Oh this is really fun”.

8th January 2016

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feministshakedown-blog · 10 years ago

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I wrote this as part of Project O’s screening of SWAGGA - a film by Katarzyna Perlak at Artsadmin.

It’s about the moment in my piece O where I don’t think I can bend and straighten my knee one more time. It’s about how our bodies carry on.

#dance #bodies

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feministshakedown-blog · 10 years ago

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A story of bones

A bone worries, left abandoned in an inky black space. Muscles have departed and there are gaps between connections. The whole skeletal system is finding it painful to stand still, polite and upright - no sloughing.

But

These elemental structures, these rocks within us move if we’d only listen. Steve Paxton’s smalldance.

Like marble - crystalline and without straight lines. Refreshingly queer bones always adapting and expressing histories, growth, memories suspended in a pearly red soup shimmering around us. A bone mobile hanging from the ceiling.

So, where do the aches come from? Tired to my bones I was. Tired to the bone. Now not but how endlessly time stretches when your bones feel emotions. Joyous bones? Light bones? Confident and secure bones.

They are so able.

Bones quietly go about their business. Working in the ultimate community. Negotiating with the others and with gravity but keeping their own individual integrity with no desire to be anything else. My clavicle will never want to be my little toe. It is fine clavicle-ing.

I have a lot to learn from my bones.

#bones #dance

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feministshakedown-blog · 10 years ago

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Loop

finding words for resistance, no finding thoughts, lines, faces, cells, biology, stars, spaces, banisters and barriers for resistance. I sweat out my resistance. I will it out of me or does it flow actually? Actually flow and actually happen. Without hardness and aching, tired-of-trying bones, I had a dream where my teeth crumbled. Chalky, bitty, granular decay. Solid and full mouth afraid to look. Afraid to spit my bloody, chalky mess out into a weird, timeless, porcelain sink. So softness no, that was leap. So resistance, no wait, the dream, oh fuck the resting of my head against your flesh. Your wool. Was there wool? I let go and so did you. As I write there is movement here, no wait, back. Go backwards. Recall detail but don’t obsess. Listen but don’t assume you heard it right I am loosely looping, looping ,looping and trying to find something that feels like the kind of resistance that I don’t know of yet. Even while my hand is gripping and hurting. Can the ink melt? Can I become like ink melting? Marking and indelible - unreadable seeping over your polite white, straight-edged paper. Seeping. What if I seep? What if I tell you exactly what I want? What if I actually seep so much that I find out what I want? What is there? Where stamina and love really are. My words are falling now, I am sliding because it hurts, my muscles are cramping with sliding pen, sliding words, slippery meanings and tail ends of ys so they look like gs everything is an effort to have meaning to be legible to be understood even when I am exhausted and aching and I might just grab my pen with my teeth in a minute because my hand hurts so much and also my hand is slipping so the nib of the pen is in kine with my knuckle. I am writing fromm ny knuckle I am sliding, my ps have become bs. I breathe and sit up and hold my head before returning. The pause was about this long

and then I was back. Where am I any closer? Am I any closer to finding space, more room to breath here. Now all is illegible and mm pen in much even learning the poge much. What a loop hurp loop loop heys like a signature now, like a rhythm. . … .. .. Oh oh oh . .

another pause. I seem to have collected writing, legibility and writing again. Is everything circular? Soft and unfinished

- written during a New Empowering School session led by Zinzi Minott

I have also made a short something called Loop

#Dance #Writing #Resistance

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