We Need To Talk

I like that. In focusing on riotous sound, I wanted to emphasize the creative making that is at the heart of tumult and upheaval, at the heart of Black noise. I wanted to engage the radical art of undoing, to regard it as a practice of improvisation, but one not tethered to the cult of male genius. So how do we think of the space of collective practice and generative disorder and recognize it as essential — both to survival and the making of beauty — in this most terrible of places.

People say, “How can you, as a black person, choose to work in this white form?” I’ve discovered that performance art is as black as the skin on my ass. Black folks have just as much right to it as anyone, hey, maybe more …

Trap is an art form in and of itself. I try to understand it. It fascinates me. I’ve learned I need to gain a better grasp of the mechanics at play in these works of art. I feel the need to explore how this art stimulates (and sometimes simulates) love, how it can stimulate contact between people. How does it hold people together? I mean I shouldn’t like this music. I’m 45 years old. I’m a mom. Why does this music still stimulate me? Where does that stimulation touch? What Future does with his voice and his speech I could never even try to emulate. Still my brain can soak it up. That’s why I talk about “the surround.” There’s hip hop now in the air we breathe.

The contradiction between critical distance and authentic experience is assimilated into the performance of blackness.

For Black women who produce cultural texts invested in depicting sexual encounters and representation of their desire materialized, trickster converges the discourse of desire, gender, and the other as a way to speak about sexual encounter.

In each case of choreography and song, black performance produces an ethical demand for critical commentary, critical change that is radical, change that is grounded and founded in the capacity for any song, any dance, any word to be otherwise than it is. This demand for change, change that is founded in movement, in vibration, produces a critique of the normative world.

The repetition of public outcries, cautious celebrations, struggles over "the image" or even tepid ambivalence reveal the affective power of black representational practices.

Put another way, blackness and performance, have, historically, existed via a violent tethering, built upon often theatrical spectacles of torment that reinforced relationships defined by dominance.