The Walker Art Center presents Claudia Rankine & Will Rawls: What Remains
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The Walker Art Center presents Claudia Rankine & Will Rawls: What Remains

“While ‘surveillance’ might conjure images of security cameras, cellphones, and other machines, What Remains considers less concrete, more culturally ingrained kinds of surveillance that shape and have shaped the black American experience.” —New York Times

 

What Remains unites the minds of genre-busting and Bessie Award–winning choreographer Will Rawls, poet and MacArthur Fellow Claudia Rankine. In a space representing the entombed imagination, the artists present resonant movement and language inspired by Rankine’s texts on racial violence—Citizen and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (Graywolf Press)—in response to black citizens’ visibility and disappearances. Featuring performers Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Leslie Cuyjet, Jessica Pretty, and Tara Aisha Willis.

What Remains will be in the McGuire Theater at 8pm on Thursday, March 7, 8pm on Friday, March 8, and Saturday March 9 at 4pm and 8pm.


TICKETS
Tickets for the show will be $28 ($22.40 for Walker Members). For more information, call the box office at 612.375.7600 or visit online at walkerart.org/tickets


MEET THE ARTISTS
On Thursday, meet the artists in a post-show reception in the Cityview Room.  Following Friday’s performance stay for a Q and A with the artists.


ABOUT THE ARTISTS

 

ABOUT CLAUDIA RANKINE

Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; two plays including Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; numerous video collaborations, and is the editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind.  Her most recent play, The White Card, premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson/ American Repertory Theater). Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry. In 2016, she co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

 

ABOUT WILL RAWLS

Rawls is a choreographer, writer and lifelong performer based in Brooklyn, NY. His practice combines dance with other media to investigate the poetics of blackness, ambiguity and abstraction. His inquiries into bodily states and humanity aim to redraw notions of power and form. Rawls has presented his work at The Chocolate Factory, MoMA PS1, Performa 15, The Whitney Museum of American Art, ImpulsTanz and Portland Institute of Contemporary Art. In addition to presenting his own performances, he collaborated with Ishmael Houston-Jones to co-curate the Danspace Project Platform 2016: Lost and Found. Focusing on the intergenerational impact of the AIDS epidemic on dancers, women and people of color, he helped organize performances, reconstructions, discussions and co-edited the catalogue, Lost and Found: Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS,Then and Now. His other writings have been published by Artforum, Triple Canopy, les presses du réel, The Museum of Modern Art, The Hammer Museum. He is recipient of a 2017-2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2017 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency, the 2017 Bessie Award for Emerging Choreographer, and a 2015 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant. He has held teaching fellowships at Wesleyan University and Williams College and continues to lecture widely in university and festival contexts.


 

RELATED EVENTS

Claudia Rankine: Notes on The White Card
Wednesday, April 10, 7pm
Walker Cinema $25 ($20 Walker members, $12 students)

Author of innovative and thoughtful texts on race, selfhood, and contemporary American life, Claudia Rankine is a powerful and influential cultural force. Join Rankine as she reads and reflects on her recently published play, The White Card, which unpacks the insidious ways racism manifests itself in everyday situations and questions how our society can progress if whiteness stays invisible.

This program is a part of the Walker Art Center’s Education and Public Programs Mack Lecture Series.

The Mack Lecture series is made possible by generous support from Aaron and Carol Mack.


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