Program notes …

black light, white noise (BLWN) was presented at the Achura Karpa Festival in Bogotá, Colombia in conjunction with the Circus and its Others conference in February 2024. This experimental work was programmed in a shorter modified form like in this video. BLWN typically runs thirty-five to forty-five minutes in length.

This is a lure …a propositional lure toward relational becoming with curious discomfort. To continue to move with this thinking-making, stay tuned for the publication of my PhD dissertation coming soon!

As an artist, my work tends to require an active audience to truly enter into the work. It is a kind of engagement that seeks to stimulate activity at multiple registers. The activation might appear in different ways. (Try not to be anxious about understanding it all.) There is no one right, correct way. There is only your way, the audience, the reader, the fellow relational body organically encounters. The work may conjure questions, epiphanies, confusion, an array of emotional responses. Let them breathe and take flight. It’s an invitation.

Languaging the ineffable destabilizes, cuts across a nebulous dimension in between language and movement. Like language, video is impoverished in its ability to harness the affective, haptic somatic relational fielding, flattening the complexity of the multiple oscillating relational encounters. In the sharing of the experience with others, becoming relational and surrendering to sustained uninterrupted conditions, focus and presence shape-shift relationally, drifting between planes of consciousness, with the body-light-sound (a circus body, black light, white noise), infolding-outfolding, lingering in the thickness of potentiality, in-difference. In the durational liveness, linear time melts away. There is no escaping the gravity of being pulled introspectively, setting a tone for settling into meditation and non/sensuous attunement. In the settling, the fabric of space-time moves durationally where the gravity (weight), gravitational force pulls focus inward. In a sense, you have to see it to believe. Gotta be there. Wish you were.

black light, white noise—
 becoming asymmetrical difference,
  doing trapeze without trapeze

Thinking-making,
 scholar-artist entangled,
  research-creation

embraces an array of knowledges, exploring other modes of thought like intuition and embodied practice, unfolding as a thought experiment of think- making. Such modalities are not necessarily meant to be fully understood but to let thought take flight in the feltness of complexity. Try not to hang onto the words spoken but try to feel what is becoming, palpitating, that our impoverished language fails to grasp, as evolved thinking that cannot be reduced to language or conceptual determinations or representations or identity. Research-creation opens new possibilities for thought and for breathing life into the differential between artistic and scholarly practice.

BLAKshēp, a research-creation endeavor employing errant modalities of improvisation, experimentation and attunement, often with promiscuous engagement and idiosyncratic slippages, evades capture of clear articulation; holds space for the conditions of physical exploration and conceptual development between the practical; and decenters a circus body and the conceptual, doing trapeze without trapeze. BLAKshēp works with a primary choreographic proposition (Manning, Always more than one 97), both practically and conceptually, a DUET with SELF¹. As a technique of relation², DUET with SELF, which shapes and unfolds in different modalities, negotiates an ontological turning-inside-out of the many paradoxical, shapeshifting mysteries of a (multidimensional) SELF, a polyvalent SELF in continual superposition³ that actualizes under the relational encounter of DUET. DUET inflects a SELF: a SELF, not a predicated SELF that is centralized who supervises unfoldings, but one of relation, a leaky SELF⁴ of continual becomings, a multiplicity of singularity.

A re-orientation of Self
My, I, self, the individual, identity giving way,
consent …not to be a single being.
From fixed to metastable,
My, I, self gives way—relational inseparability that preserves ontogenerative differential
Moving away from a concrete sense,
rather offering a proposition of a metaphysical structure,
an ontology of difference,
becoming in-difference
organizing experience which dissolves the individual as primary.
Entangled collapse of Self/Other
NOT a single-being but a being of Relation.

A series of unforeseen seismic life events—mothering, pandemic, cancer and more, resulting in subsequent limitations—activated necessary creative registers over the course of years. The cut, the crack, as enabling constraints, ushered new thinking-making through experimental, errant, radical intuitive attunement and idiosyncratic modalities. In conjunction, the theoretical research of Black studies and process philosophy informed the practice of “decentering”: decentering my relationship to trapeze which transposed to my relationship to whiteness. The concept and practice of “decentering” SELF coalesces, creating the conditions and fertile foundation for the development of the notion of DUET with SELF and the practical explorations of doing trapeze without trapeze. In the relay of practice and theory, black light, white noise materializes, activating inquiry into the relationship of blackness and whiteness; entanglement of a circus body (non/human relation); the labor⁵ of estrangement toward the consent not to be a single being and a process orientated world. black light, white noise: becoming asymmetrical, doing trapeze without trapeze serves as the thinking-making that contours the choreographic proposition, a DUET with SELF, but also moves as the mechanism that brings it into expression.

DUET with SELF moves as a technique of relation. It shapes an enabling constraint for practical and conceptual development but moves also as a practice of continual questioning. As a force-form, it creates the conditions to isolate an interval of the fold⁶—unfolding, infolding of becoming, the differential- living in-difference—to expose possible, toxic habitual refrains but also to open up potentiality for imagination, creativity and change. It is a kind of taking (self) inventory. DUET with SELF emerges through the putting into play the self- perpetuating cycle of theory and practice—Black studies and process philosophy through/with the practical, a circus body in-act.

BLWN is durational, duration⁷. Moving haptically as a non-sensual becoming. Attending to sensual, non-sensuous richness of the folds of a SELF in DUET. Stripping down, a necessity to attune to the in-excess-of. Pulling relational counterparts of a SELF into slowness.⁸ Living in the entangled thickness of the moment. Lingering in the ontogenerative interval.

Black light, white noise,
frequencies in counterpoint.
Blackness, Whiteness in-difference.
A new gaze.
A Black gaze.

Trapeze disappearing but always there,
a phantom limb,
sensation of invisible presence,
the callus of connection, illegible.

A circus body morphs,
becoming relational, kinetic, entangled.
a (kinetic) body languages
a (kinetic) vocabulary.

Virtuosity succumbs, composts,
enabling a potentiality for reconditioning,
inviting novel negotiations of gravity
(counter) gravity
forces of wisdom, slowness, intimacy, feltness RE/world.

A re-orientation of Self
My, I, self, the individual, identity giving way,
consent …not to be a single being.
From fixed to metastable,
My, I, self gives way—
relational inseparability that preserves ontogenerative differential,
moving away from a concrete sense of self,
rather offering a proposition of a metaphysical structure,
an ontology of difference,
becoming in-difference,
organizing experience which dissolves the individual as primary.
Entangled collapse of Self/Other,
NOT a single-being but a being of Relation
A re-orientation of Self
My, I, self, the individual, identity giving way,
consent …not to be a single being.
From fixed to metastable,
My, I, self gives way—
relational inseparability that preserves ontogenerative differential,
moving away from a concrete sense of self,
rather offering a proposition of a metaphysical structure,
an ontology of difference,
becoming in-difference,
organizing experience which dissolves the individual as primary.
Entangled collapse of Self/Other,
NOT a single-being but a being of Relation

Whiteness as an ontological modality does not operate at the level of the epidermis but is mobilized as a way for its re/production. It is far more complicated. In The Souls of White Folk, Veronica Watson describes whiteness:

as a way of seeing and knowing the world that masquerades as universality and remains largely unnamed and unrecognized. It is exposed as a mode of social organization that is shaped by skin-color privilege and that is inextricably enmeshed with other vectors of identity such as gender, class, sexual orientation, and the organization of space (5).

Blackness escapes capture in its refusal to be defined. As a complex, fugitive and transformative force, blackness refuses singularity, refuses capture and creates new forms of life in-excess-of what is recognized. Blackness cannot be reduced to black skin, an identity or even a racial category—it is an ongoing process of movement, fugitivity and relation. Fred Moten makes a distinction between blackness as a concept and the lived experiences of black individuals (Stolen Life 18). He argues that blackness should not be confined to a property or characteristic solely belonging to black people (Universal Machine 205).

Whiteness relates to blackness not as a binary opposition. Blackness refuses such a divide. The relation of non-relation suggests that both are entangled in a field of historical, affective and material forces that shape and reshape their interactions continuously as an asymmetrical negotiation of para/ontology (Moten, Stolen Life 35).

White noise mirrors an echo chamber effect as a physical and socio-political space where sound is reflected and reinforced, often leading to prolonged or repeated echoes. Whiteness operates similarly. Insidious, incipient, pervasive, omnipresent, silent but deafening of all things NOT white. Whiteness resists change: it is entrenched in movement, perception, privilege and power structures, functioning as an echo chamber of gravitational force, of continual refrain. Manning suggests that disrupting whiteness requires altering its rhythms and tendencies (Pragmatics of the Useless 99, 163). This means refusing the comforts of whiteness and embracing instability, discomfort and new ways of being.

White estrangement describes a process of disrupting, disidentifying or alienating oneself from the constructs and privileges of whiteness by making whiteness perceptible, accountable and unsettled. It demands reconfiguring and refusing the comforts of white identity, but also engagement with its historical legacy (Watson 5). It necessitates what Tina Campt refers to as labor: “the labor of discomfort, feeling, positioning, and repositioning” (17). White people often expect “comfort” in discussions about race and resisting discomfort when their privilege is questioned. White people must refuse habitual behavior and tendencies that avoid discomfort—a discomfort that seeks reassurance and centering their feelings.

Taking inventory
Radical decentering, taken to an extreme,
taking the color blindness out of whiteness.

The true otherness of a whiteness is its privilege
Estrangement in-act
Counter gravity as a technique of relation
A black light, a Black Gaze,
A virtuosic circus body flows into slowness.

Black light showers as a Black gaze. The Black gaze challenges dominant visual codes and interpretations and allows for a different kind of looking that is not white-centered. In particular, the Black gaze disrupts the assumed neutrality of whiteness and its gaze. It functions as a form of resistance and makes legible black life (Campt).

Tina Campt’s concept of Black countergravity refers to the ways in which black people resist and challenge dominant power structures and narratives through their daily lived experiences (47). Regardless of skin color or proximity to whiteness, (counter) gravity challenges dominant power structures that seek to oppress and marginalize black people and enables alternative narratives and ways of being. (Counter) gravity as a technique of relation brings into expression practices that neutralize white privilege and lures into ontogenerative relation.

black light, white noise
Staging asymmetrical, contrapuntal difference of whiteness and blackness.
A body, transfigured circus body in-between, entangled,
pulling on planes of experience,
lingering in haecceity
Amidst a pandemic, prosthesis amputation
A virtuosic circus body flows into slowness,
doing trapeze without trapeze.
Taking inventory,
radical decentering, taken to an extreme.
Estrangement in-act,
taking the color blindness out of Whiteness.
The true otherness of a whiteness is its privilege.
A black light, a Black Gaze,
(counter) gravity as a technique of relation,
fabulates the collapse of whiteness into blackness.