Abject/body: A performative perspective on race, gender, and violence in dance

thesisIn the wake of recent events highlighting anti-Black violence in Maryland, New York, Missouri, and other states, I view my performance research as echoed in viral videos displaying real-life accounts of Black bodies violently attacked in public space. The national consciousness on race, gender, and violence as mirrored through mainstream media news outlets, such as FOX News, New York Times, and The Washington Post, displays dispossessed bodies, often depicting these bodies as "threatening," "criminal," and therefore, "expendable." How does one fully construct identity in a culture of violence and hyper-surveillance? The purpose of this MFA thesis is an attempt to engage with critical and corporeal practices of embodiment to tell us something different about violence through dance. Critical practices examine the theory behind embodiment, while corporeal practices attempt to produce theory through embodiment. The chapters here bridge the gap between performance, theory, lived experience, and activism by unearthing how cultural and political experiences of the dancing body are impacted and informed by violence. I am particularly invested in exploring how critical theories of race, gender, and trauma can be danced out and enact both emotional and intellectual ideas. This research focuses on oppression of Black bodies, queer bodies, and by implication, the bodies of women, femaleness, etc. As a conceptual artist, my approach to dance making lies in the initial inspiration from a text, theory, or article and in response, unearthing physical movement material that later emerges from the body. I am intellectually curious about how violence functions in everyday society, and how those acts of violence can be illustrated in a proscenium dance setting. I am defining violence loosely as a force used to hurt, harm, and/or kill. This concept relates to physical, psychological, and spiritual forms of violence as well. I am interested in violence, as it marks and moves certain aspects of my theorizing--the way we view it, move in between types of violence, and in response to it