“I've always rejected the idea that dance is ephemeral, that part of what defines it as an art form is that it goes away once it is performed. Perhaps that’s why I want to take a very long time working on my projects—and Speech Sounds, at least for the next few years.”
T&T/US choreographer and performance artist Makeda Thomas has been working on Speech Sounds since 2013. It is a multidisciplinary project, including dance and live performance, costume design and film.
She continues to add to the project. Her latest addition to the performance is a collaboration with Haitian artist Fabiola Jean-Louis, part of which will be presented publicly during a processional performance put on by her dance and performance institute, New Waves! in September 2016. The performance will take place as part of the 2016 West Indian American Day Carnival in Brooklyn.
Thomas said she’s excited to be working with Jean-Louis because of the work that they’ve put into building the collaboration.
“We’ve had this conversation about visioning a future that is fantastic, beautiful and rooted in our experiences as Caribbean women. We’re going into the studio with a well-thought-out approach, which is necessary when you’re trying to blend magic with the mundane and reality with the speculative and do that in a language that is specifically out of the Caribbean experience within multiple contexts, because we see this work being performed all over the world in multiple manifestations.”
Jean-Louis has been working on a Paper Dress series, which Thomas said they are thinking about incorporating into the processional performance.
“Then I think our collaboration will grow into where she’s designing costumes for the stage performance work that’s going to be presented in New York in the fall of 2016/ spring 2017.”
Thomas then intends to carry the project into film and an installation, which “will have dance and photography and film and installation performance artwork and it’s big and beautiful and fantastical and magical as we want to see it be.”
Thomas’ work is also based on a foundation of scholarly work and research. This weekend, she presented a paper titled Brown Girl in the Ring: Caribbean Considerations of the Afrofuture at the second conference of the Collegium for African Diasporic Dance, of which she is a founding executive member.
“The title riffs off of Further Considerations of Afrofuturism by Kodwo Eshun and basically considers how Caribbean cultural forms, in particular dance and performance movement, navigate time and space and create new histories, aesthetics, and inform what a scholar based at (the City University of New York) CUNY, Conor Tomás Reed, calls Caribbean Futurisms.
“I’m interested in how the term Caribbean Futurisms might be useful in thinking about choreographic and performance processes that could be used by Caribbean dance artists and invigorate a more broad conversation when we talk about Afro-futurism.”
Thomas said her work is heavily influenced by these considerations.
“Looking at Fabiola’s photography, and the kind of movement that it inspires, and then having her really being interested in what that movement could be and look like and in then creating new photography out of that movement, there's this constant forward and backward conversation that's happening which is really at one of the core tenets of science fiction and Afro-futurism in that it's not only a moment of the present, but a conversation that's happening between the present and what we imagine the future could look like.
“Her work is seamless in its magic and I'm interested in embodying it as a dance artist and choreographing that.” She said she’s also working on another section of the performance, including research for one called Inheritance, which is a moko jumbie performance project.
Thomas said the way dance is regarded as fleeting and ephemeral reminds her of life. “It’s sort of saying that life is ephemeral, that once you die that’s it, and some part of me totally rejects that. I feel like the actions that we make, the things that we do, the people that we connect with, are a continuation of our lives.
“Perhaps in some way this is me wanting to make the performative process demonstrate that it can live, that there is much life rather than this constant thought of it going away. I'm interested in taking a very long time in working with the project and developing it in all its facets until I’m done with it.”
Speech sounds
Speech Sounds gets its title from Octavia Butler’s Hugo Award winning science fiction short story about a future world “where the only likely common language was body language.”
Three powerhouse performers engage a performative strategy that pushes its elements in, to, over and beyond themselves; and explores the metaphors for art and technology that come out of Afrofuturist culture. It looks at improvisation, as an exploration of the dancer’s self, and how it transitions to a shared experience with the audience. It further asks, then, what does it mean to be a performer of the present? Of the future?
Each performance, each iteration of the work exists in multiple variations, with each variation being characterised by the improvisations of the performers. In this way, the work is imbued with its own autonomous power that engages a more present performer—a future performer—in moments of infinite imaginations and recreation.
Speech Sounds is about the spaces between selves; of how individuals connect and disconnect; of isolation and companionship; of what happens when we lose that which we value the most—be that a person, symbol, idea or name; and, of arriving at a loss of words.
(Courtesy makedathomas.org/)