{"id":9858,"date":"2019-10-16T12:31:31","date_gmt":"2019-10-16T17:31:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/afam\/?p=9858"},"modified":"2020-12-31T12:16:04","modified_gmt":"2020-12-31T17:16:04","slug":"black-performance-ii-knowing-and-being","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/afam\/2019\/10\/16\/black-performance-ii-knowing-and-being\/","title":{"rendered":"49.4, Black Performance II: Knowing and Being"},"content":{"rendered":"

Black Performance I: Subject and Method<\/em> collects research that shows how performance can act as an optic and object of study. The authors\u2019 diverse subjects reveal resonances of the past in performance in music and movement, poetry, media, art, museums, memory, and thought. The research in Black Performance II<\/em>: Knowing and Being<\/em> further demonstrates the ways performances in various genres contemplate and structure ways of knowing and ways of being as systems entangled in embodiments and critical interactivity. In this, women scholars identify performers\u2019 diverse strategies for making meaning and remaking inherited knowledge. These scholars discover performance structures of Black feminist love in the work of various artists.<\/p>\n

The performances reflect on new ways of being as much as the scholars who analyze them. Each performance also forges new ways of being that address how we understand, and perhaps feel, blackness, gender, transnational womanhood, community, sexuality, and history. The communities invoked develop common language and sensibility through aesthetics, speech, and writing. Several articles foreground the ways in which people work through ideas together in an enactment of community recognition. This occurs through relationships to form, through conversation, choreography, and writing. Melissa Blanco Borelli reveals Black transnational artists structure as radical presence through musical performance practices. Jasmine Elizabeth Johnson reveals dancers\u2019 choreographic collaborative work founded on sharing spoken memories and stories as a process of \u201ctenderness.\u201d Shana L. Redmond experiments with collaborative and contrapuntal writing practices between Hansberry and Baldwin as negotiating a terrain of sound. Redmond explores the quotidian elements of sound as form\u2014sound from the neighborhood as much as from music.<\/p>\n

At times, the performers shape ideas with their audiences as interlocutor. In Aleksandra Szaniawska\u2019s essay, Janelle Monae narrates queer possibilities via performances that find greater resonance before live and constructed audiences. In Rashida Braggs\u2019s piece, our author as performer, addresses the nature of audiences\u2019 hearing of history. Braggs brings performative ontology to the page to play with text as a conduit between thought, knowledge-making, performance, blackness, the body, music, and history. She recounts a performance she created as an investigation of Sidney Bechet\u2019s performance of Gershwin\u2019s \u201cSummertime,\u201d itself a layered enactment of historical consciousness. Braggs\u2019s endeavor reflects the investigative and pedagogical directions of research as embodied practice.<\/p>\n

Artist Delita Martin<\/a>\u2019s cover to this issue, \u201cIf Spirits Danced\u201d poses a possibility echoed by our authors. With a quotidian boldness, the direct gaze of a Black girl in blue calmly engages and challenges. She ventures a hypothesis of lively possibility in her provocative titular \u201cif\u201d alongside an embedded invitation to do so, to dance in spirit and gesture.<\/p>\n

Intro available for a limited time here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Black Performance I: Subject and Method collects research that shows how performance can act as an optic and object of study. The authors\u2019 diverse subjects reveal resonances of the past in performance in music and movement, poetry, media, art, museums, memory, and thought. The research in Black Performance II: Knowing and Being further demonstrates the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1694,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1487],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/afam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9858"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/afam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/afam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/afam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1694"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/afam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9858"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/afam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9858\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9899,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/afam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9858\/revisions\/9899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/afam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/afam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/afam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}