I started this project wanting to make meditation tapes to calm my rampant alienation and to slow my racing thoughts. But what does calm look like when you embody countless contradictions, conflicts and traumas, and language can't stretch to hold you? When it was never your language anyway? You look out at the city and it is like your beating heart, complicated, congested and broken. Some things need to break and I don't want space or distance but to assume my hybrid form right here. I want to break this space open. I want to be broken open.

This is the current audio track from BASICTENSION, a collection of dances, writing, text and music forming a series of studies resonating in the tensions between social, professional, psychic, spiritual, physiological, healing and technological practices and processes. A play of multiple textures between multiple realities, shifting boundaries between what is allowed inside and what is let out; techno-meditations on states of being and coping with being and bodies and other people and all that mad energy. That is, some music, some words, some dancing to encourage, to ignore, to suggest, to convince, to seduce, to say a daily prayer that is a manifesto that is a fuck you that is whatever it needs to be.

A love/break-up letter to contemporary dance:

This project began in 2017. I wanted to make a contemporary dance performance in order to pose – and maybe try to answer for myself, the one in this body – the question of how/whether I can actually engage with the aesthetic value system of what is known as contemporary dance, developed through a history of what is called postmodern and modern dance, now existing in relation to works and practices dubbed post-dance.

I had been thinking about the historicisation of black bodies, of the relegation to the past – a largely erased past in terms of western ideas of archives and documentation, as well as the colonial and postcolonial (not to say it is over but to use as a name for the colonial present) infrastructure – and the inaccessible ‘contemporary’, the inaccessible present. The references that are often read from my body – and my work – are to clubs and not theatre spaces, which means that I have to ask the question of whether my body is truly allowed into, accepted within and can be seen within the art space, or if this is part of a continued erasure of the concept and real presence of the Black Artist inside of the colonial project. And where does this body want to place itself anyway.

// Power //

At a point I realised that the alienation I’d felt throughout my dance training was not just my general angst but the fact that that training made no space for and had no interest in me. Ideas of neutrality, of balance, of centre, of authenticity, of freedom, of abstraction, of posture... Sometimes I have thought that contemporary dance is pure toxic ideology.

I wanted to purge myself of this haunting, to leave this history I’ve been taught, that has sought to dominate my body and to direct my thinking. They say the only way out is through. Although I am not sure that I believe it.

I wanted many voices, I wanted so much self-expression and interpretation and invention, multiple histories, eyes, landscapes, knowledges, interests, logics, to help me access what was there or to create something new there, to overwrite, to acknowledge bias, entanglement and inescapability, to break it. To break open.

I wrote to friends and colleagues and asked them to watch Trio A – then to watch Anna Pavlova dance the Dying Swan, then to watch the dance scene in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis – the whitest dances I could think of. And whilst watching these to write down instructions for their replication.

This one is for you.

These instructions were then edited and recorded and the performance is a practice of dancing in response. Breaking and being broken by history. Enabling mutation, transformation, being the dancer body-machine obedient, responsive, inventive... What are the possibilities, what is the potential? Finding pleasure in the contradiction, in the impossibility, in the failure that is so constant it goes beyond…

Moving through this history that is constantly reconstructed through and by present eyes giving form shaping us – some things need to break. We are sticky we are slippery we are moving, for release to abandon to discover and encounter and say no – is it possible to give and take simultaneously?

It is 05:49 as I am writing this and I am full of feeling for the mad multidimensional intensity of dancing. I hope you find something here.

Credits
Concept and choreography: Last Yearz Interesting Negro
Voice: Last Yearz Interesting Negro, Stephanie McMann
Sound Design: Josh Anio Grigg
Music: Josh Anio Grigg, Junior XL, Shelley Parker
Text edited from writing by: Rachel Baker, Jonathan Burrows, Rosalie Doubal, Jane Frances Dunlop, Josh Anio Grigg, Alexandrina Hemsley, Jamila Johnson-Small, Gillie Kleiman, Stephanie McMann, Sara Sassenelli

Last Yearz Interesting Negro is featured in The Wire 430. Subscribers can read the full article via the digital archive.