Kandis Williams on Triadic Ballet
Wielding collage as a tool of Black feminist resistance, Kandis Williams is an artist whose work encompasses collage, performance, and publishing. On the opening day of her exhibition at the Walker, Kandis Williams: A Surface, she discussed her work Triadic Ballet and its relationship to Bauhaus, Black embodiment, and looking longer and harder inside oneself.
Taylor Jasper
I was curious how your approach to choreographing dance and ballet in your work Triadic Ballet mirrors your strategies of visual collage that explore the tension between freedom and constraint. How do you conceive of choreography as a metaphor for the societal scripts that govern Black embodiment?
Kandis Williams
In terms of freedom and restraint, the choreography of Triadic Ballet is a lot about the languages of social dance. I conceive of them as four forks of movement language: the militaristic, the agrarian, the courtly, and the metaphysical or ritual.
I am interested in the slippage that exists between restraint and freedom of expression. For instance, with militarized movements, you get a lot of restraint, rigidity, and hyper-disciplined movements—movements that work in collectives that I call formation movements. But you also get these really beautiful open gestures, such as the swing, the throw, the landing of the punch. I think about people like Muhammad Ali—floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee.
When we witness the dancer, we become of two bodies. We end up learning how to move in our own bodies by watching the dancing body. With Black embodiment, that’s become such an important language that we all speak.
For instance, there seem to be a lot of social anecdotes about Black people just doing a head nod, and we get it. But a lot of the conditions of the transatlantic slave trade restricted movements. In a way this birthed a kind of Black social choreographic movement that carries so much weight and so many small and nuanced cues, especially around anticipating violent acts or restriction. Anticipating not being able to speak or not being able to move freely.
With Black embodiment throughout the diaspora, I find so much of our movement language is hyper communicative. Things like TikTok reveal that socially so many people are watching Black bodies and learning how to distance themselves. The Black dancing body especially ends up being a public social-cue maker.
We see that across so many political spectrums, the importance of the Black preacher and his movements, the silences that Black women have around domestic labor and performance of femininity. Those hyper-articulated social movements become building blocks for so many other non-Black bodies to learn how to socially engage.
I’ve been all over the world, but I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t know who Aretha Franklin is. It doesn’t matter their race, nationality, gender, or background. Even if they don’t know who the current U.S. president is, they know a kind of Black physical movement. Be it for better or worse, they will know the mammy or hip hop. I have seen and been to bucking and twerk workshops everywhere from China to Portugal.
I am interested in how these types of social embodiment are related to choreography.
TJ
What led you to create this work?
KW
It emerged out of thinking about how the Black body moves through space and the sociability of Blackness for a general audience. I was thinking about how we see Black bodies move in spaces, like the court, the stage, the athletic center, and the stadium. All these places where Black bodies and virtuosity are presented for people to gather around and watch. There has always been a bittersweetness for me around the choreographic work because of how fetishism is at play there. How racial distancing is at play there. How performers have to come in and out of cultural awareness and unawareness.
Coming out of dramaturgy, I started to make choreographic work on my own in 2016. At first I was interested not in making performers do jumps and kicks in a rhythm or a pattern. Between 2016 and 2020, I was looking at the social choreographies of the police shooting videos, the choreographies of the fascist parades and the protest marches. I was interested in the histories of Black radicality that end up being minimized, co-opted, or appropriated.
Triadic Ballet is a culmination of exploring those forks of dance, from ritual to militaristic and courtly.
TJ
The work references Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadisches Ballett (Triadic Ballet) that he created at the Bauhaus. That ballet became the most widely performed avant-garde artistic dance, and at the time Schlemmer conceived of the human body as a new artistic medium that could use movement to emphasize that every art is artificial.
In your work, the dancers moved over a geometric floor. How did you arrive at this particular visual and spatial logic, and how does it relate to systems of surveillance or container?
KW
The spatial floor directly comes from Schlemmer. He was a costume designer and not solely a choreographer, which is also why I’m drawn to his work. A lot of his costuming was specifically made to make the bodies move in certain ways and in certain shapes. That kind of strange, almost sadistic, flattening impulse is very interesting to me.
The Bauhaus included diagramming in its approach to so many things, from movement to textiles and even religious images. What they outputted were a lot of flattened and idealized forms that are actually composites of so many other ethnic traditions, forms found in the actual world outside the canvas or the white cube. That led me to think about surveillance and containment in that way of flattening what is out in the world and turning into diagrams and shapes.
The lines on the floor are about flattening down into a diagram how these kinds of social movements travel from point A to B. The dancers in the work also present how those gestures move. The images that play behind the dancers are also trying to draw out the real-world social relationships as well, like the connection between the movements of the Indigenous Hopi butterfly dance and white woman yoga movement courses that you can find on YouTube.
Those things are directly talking to each other in terms of the movements, even if the cultures are being completely pulled apart. Being able to see, or surveillance, that can only happen in the kind of media world that we now have, where many kinds of people were captured on film as they were simultaneously erased and denied life. They were captured, fetishized, and praised in media form.
There is a kind of constant hybridization, cannibalization, that produces these patterns of movement. When I look at Janet Jackson’s Control music video or Beyonce’s formations at the Super Bowl half-time show, I see Black, Brown, and Indigenous bodies trying to constantly reclaim the power of that gaze. At the same time, they are also being mired in the sad and bittersweet realities of the Negro political truth that those cultures are really distant from us, can’t exist anymore, or we have lost the spiritual connections to these ritual movements. But there is a constant loop of understanding that loss and also trying to keep innovating and embodying them again.
I see Blackness as a constant juggling of surveillance, containment, and re-embodiment.
TJ
You’ve described using collage in your work as a counternarrative and reparative method. How does this relate to your approach to choreographing dance and ballet?
KW
With chorography or ballet, I’m trying to pull a lot of those flattened movements from the colonial depictions found on film of dance into the contemporary space of how we’re socially dancing.
TJ
In developing the choreography with Black dancers in your studio, you emphasize movements that defy stereotypical Western constraints. How did this collaboration shape the final work?
KW
I’m not a dancer and I’m not formally trained as a dancer in any way. I don’t even think I’m that great of a social dancer either. But I do like dancing, and it’s always been something I’ve loved seeing. Growing up in Baltimore, we had a huge dance culture. There were a lot of social dances.
When I watch dance, I am interested in finding their language of movement. What are they doing? What’s being repeated? What is being flexed?
Being someone who could watch dance for hours, I was always into how the steps were collaborative, the shifts and trends, or even how we name social dances from the wine names in the Caribbean. All the Caribbean dances have names, particularly all new ones being invented all the time.
That language is something I’ve been tapping into and working with Black dancers on. Especially dancers who have been trained in all these extreme dance languages they learn from traditional ballet studios, companies, dance directors, and institutions. Working together to think of restraints in terms of the ballet that privileges from the torso up, stiffness, and elongation.
When I work with the Black dancers, it’s really nice because we can go in between those traditional restrictive and social dances. What I like to do is sit with them and talk through a lot of those languages so that we can come up with ways of working between them. Maybe they say, “Okay, I’m classically trained in Romanov dance ballet form, but it injured my hip.” As a director I can work with them, ask how are we going to accommodate where form is inherent in your body? Where are we going to accommodate your cultural preferences for movement?
A lot of it is also about asking people what it feels like to be perceived. I’m realizing more and more that being looked at with a Western gaze, I feel like the dancer. The dancing body is so important to question and keep interrogating because there’s so much at stake when you’re constantly on view in that way.
I was always a wallflower, so I am interested in asking the dancers: What it is like to be looked at when you are the ballerina, when you are the principal dancer, and when you are alone on stage? What makes you want to keep getting in front of an audience? What gives you that satisfaction? Where is it not satisfying? Where is it scary?
When I work with dancers, I like to pull those questions out and map them together. They end up being just as much about restraints as freedoms, which is interesting with dance. There is also something interesting about the discipline of dance, where it’s like they’ve hyper trained in order to be fluid. It is a rigidity that finds fluidity and back again.
TJ
Is there anything that you hope a viewer takes with them, reflect on, or is changed by experiencing the work?
KW
Right now, race ends up showing up for us in ways that are really opaque and sometimes not understandable solely as race. When you see someone perform their racialization in a spectacle, like as a hip-hop star, an actress, or a politician, there are all these networks that tie us and that internalize race for us.
I would love for people to sit with the work and reflect on their own internal structures. How are they created and then made opaque or transparent through those processes of power, coercion, and forced compliance? I really want people to think about those places where they are watching race as a spectacle. The moments where we’re laughing at the horror, the moments where we’re crying with joy, the moments we are being asked to perform our politics, and all those moments that feel so paradoxical. How do some performances codify hatred, codify violence, and codify murder as normal?
I would love for people to leave with a stronger desire to look longer and harder inside themselves and at the surfaces of their engagement with politics and history.▪︎
Experience Triadic Ballet for yourself. Now on view in Kandis Williams: A Surface through August 24, 2025. Learn more here.
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