To spark discussion, the Walker invites Twin Cities artists and critics to write reviews of our performances. The ongoing Re:View series shares a diverse array of independent voices and opinions; it doesn’t reflect the views or opinions of the Walker or its curators. Here, artist and writer Isela Xitlali Gómez R. shares her perspective on last night’s performance of What Remains by Will Rawls and Claudia Rankine.
The world as we know it, perhaps, isn’t the world as we know it.
The people we define, now stay with me here, are not as we define them.
Maybe definition is the problem. Maybe it’s the methodology.
But probably, it is the way the world has cut up humanity—in real time and in language—to justify, oh, I don’t know…. violence. Against Black citizens.
Violence like criminalization. Violence like caricature. Like the canon. Violence like everything else that Whiteness has done. Does.
What Remains is both what we are left with and what Claudia Rankine and Will Rawls have pointed us toward, have urged us to reconsider, reconfigure.
Born at Bard Live Arts, now living at the McGuire Theater for the next few nights, it is a collaboration between medium as much as it is between artists.
Four performers, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Leslie Cuyjet, Jessica Pretty, and Tara Aisha Willis—brilliant creators—flex between poetry, dance, chorus. They have each other. They have joy. Fear. Grief. Language, one that lives before and beyond the taint of colonialism. Language, jazz and the riff. Movement, free and methodical.
One holds beat and chord in the corner.
Three of them march. Into the yellow light. Out and into the red light. To and fro and through. Always in our view. We think we see them. We don’t though. We imagine them. The way the world has told us to.
She says, into two microphones. I am this. And this is sensitive.
Again. I am this. And this is sensitive.
She is feeling so many things and she does not list them out. She does not need to. She should not have to. And yet, someone [read White] is always wondering, begging, forcing for definition for concretization, for concision, incision.
I am this. And this is sensitive.
I cannot imagine a clearer picture of openness. A more powerful call for recognition, for let-me-be. Be with mine. Be alone. Be alive. Be vulnerable without fear.
Two big guys, she remembers, are walking and talking about dying, or something close to it. One says to the other his conclusion. She says, I think he means he could live with his death…. I want to tell him… [he won’t need to.]
This, after a monologue on pharmaceutical commercial counting and depression in the middle of the night, reminds me of the darkness of survival humor. Sharp and so abruptly funny to those with whom it rings true.
Then there is appropriation. Of Black culture. Of Black art. Of Blackness. But the jazz, the interludes, the play and dance and laugh. That stuff is hard to steal. Whiteness, White violence cannot replicate improvisation. Or light and reflection. Beaming from a disco ball. That she takes with her in the end. You cannot have this. Reflection is not yours to take. No more erasure.
This is a story about stories. The omniscient creator [read artist]. It is all art and bodies and history and movement and movements in flux.
The fact of the matter is—and all we can be sure of—it is what remains. It is this. And it is sensitive.
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