Claudia Rankine & Will Rawls Discuss Self-Surveillance in New Performance Work

Dance writer Siobhan Burke spoke to Claudia Rankine and choreographer Will Rawls for the New York Times about surveillance, "the already dead space," the luxury of just dancing, and their new work, "What Remains," which runs today through Sunday, commissioned as part of the performance exhibition We're Watching at Bard's Fisher Center. "Its guiding, open-ended question, as [Fisher Center Artistic Director Gideon Lester] put it in a recent interview, is this: 'What is the effect of the surveillance state on the experience of being human?'” More:

While “surveillance” might conjure images of security cameras, cellphones and other machines, “What Remains” considers less concrete, more culturally ingrained kinds of surveillance that shape and have shaped the black American experience. Performed by Marguerite Hemmings, Jessica Pretty and Tara Willis, who are joined onstage by the sound designer Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, it draws from Ms. Rankine’s landmark texts on racial violence — the lyric poems “Citizen” and “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” — taking them apart and meshing them with movement.

In responding to the exhibition’s theme, Mr. Rawls and Ms. Rankine thought not only about being surveilled by others but also about self-surveillance.

“That’s one thing about being black in America,” Ms. Rankine said, speaking by phone. “You have to curtail your movements, to live in such a way that what the white gaze projects upon blackness will not end your life. So you’re always thinking, can I walk at night? Can I hold Skittles in my hand? Can I have my cellphone out? If it glitters, will somebody think it’s a gun? At what point can I just be?”

Just being, or just dancing — the luxury of that and, perhaps, the impossibility — is a point of interest for Mr. Rawls. His own work often addresses, through marriages of movement, music and text, the complexities of being black in the predominantly white lineage of postmodern dance.

“One never just happens to be black, even in the most abstract dance,” he said. “Whiteness in our society — and this is something Claudia talks about, too — is the space that produces the conditions and terms against which all other lives are measured and enabled or disabled. Dance doesn’t escape those power dynamics.”

Read the full piece at the NYT. Tickets to "What Remains," and more info about all performances in We're Watching, can be found at the Bard Fisher Center for the Performing Arts website.