Session 3: Dancing in the afrocene
Rutendo
Offer a libation to everything that can dance within us.
Bayo
Bridges ought not dance. It’s an event when baseline realities start to shake. The bridge as a figure of whiteness.
Why call it whiteness and not capitaloscene or something less controversial? Whiteness is provisional. The conceptual gesture is to notice that we live in a world defined by a sense of dominance. It is not white people, it is an arrangement that isolates bodies to create the dissociated self.
It dances with neurotypicality. There is an ideal to reach. We are all measured by this.
Whiteness dances with capital and extractivism. It is thought as permanent. Whiteness is dancing just like the bridge.
It’s a brand new day. We will hold space for this vibration. Dance is decay, when the body refuses to be localized. Becoming black. Potential variations on how we are experiencing and being experienced by the world.
Interrogate the parameter of welcome. The news is the troubling gesture that questions where we are. We are moving from A to A. Excavating where we already are.
Whiteness polices the cracks. We are all enlisted in policing activities.
We insist that what is new has to be knowable, to be able to pronounce it, easily digestible, it must resonate, it must offer resolution, it must fit in my to-do list, it must be neat. We might be repeating the imperatives.
Sometimes the world is not available for these. Emergence is perverse. This is what the sensorium wants to do. Welcome.
Breakout: welcome each other, play with what is radically hospitable, the unsaid, the yet unsayable.
Edgard Gouveia Júnior
Agree on a color to dance with your screen. Also an object. Find other ways to reach this agreement.
Conversation with Bayo and Mama V
Wellness industry is trillions of dollars. People are sick.
The biomedical model is a complete failure. It creates the pharmaceutical industry. People start to pay for a fix. The drug isn’t targeting what you have. It markets and sells what should be part of our relation.
What US people have is loneliness. The elites can get well. But wellness cannot be sold. Wellness is an energetic exchange, it’s in community, in collectivity, it’s in how we relate to the earth, how we serve, how we love.
Our appartness becomes hard to sustain. You are entitled to be well all by yourself. It’s frightening. It is impossible to heal outside of community.
“Perfect” lives so profoundly lonely. Being well is being with others. White stability is doing everything to push to the confined individuality. Avoiding the insecurity, the mess. You need to identify the self, which is increasingly more expensive.
Go into the wound, it’s a portal opening into something else.
We are being constantly organized into shape, told to perform. Cultures of trauma as a portal.
Trauma is modernity’s way of naming something it doesn’t know how to approach.
Trust vibrations, trust energy. Dance. Nothing is done that is not a dance. Fact vibrates at the speed of mystery.
A prayer:
May this dancing moment open us up to cracks and spaces of new power with the world.
May we go to all the places where we tell ourselves we cannot go because we couldn’t handle it.
May we feel joy In that which makes us feel insecure as it is the pathway to another existence.
And may we be welcome into those spaces. Into those movements, into those unspeakable errors and paradigms.
May we be made welcome in ways that our bodies cannot even tolerate
now. In the anagrammatic, in the dishuman, in the more than human.
May we allow ourselves to live in a space which is constantly asking us to open. To not know. To delight in what is beyond our reach. So that the reaching becomes a movement of pure sexual delight. Because it is taking us somewhere. Where we know we have been before in our ancestral beings, but where we are finding again.
May the instability of this moment. The wobbling, jiggling, wiggling moments that we’re in, which may be terrifying to our senses of stability, may they bubble up new allies, new alliances, new futures, new hybridities. That we find in the dance a sanctuary always, always in the making.
May our search for security and identity be replaced with our hunger and search for connection.
Bayo
There’s a story by a yoruba elder about Eshu. The man at the crossroads, a trickster, a shape-shifter, who holds agency, responsible of creolization of the United States. The duality of perpetrator vrs victim. Different way of conceiving how bodies are flowing into each other.
A god of war raised an army to chase the slave ship. Eshu intercepted and convinced Ogun to not go through. He and his army went to sleep. Then Eshu followed the slaves across the Atlantic like a stowaway.
There’s a fixation with transformation and change as something huge. Consider the molecular. A god traveling with the slaves across the cracks.
The human is the territory, is a sensorium. Microplastics have been found in rain water in Mount Fuji. We are swimming in toxicity. The human has reached places that humans can’t reach. This is called Anthropocene.
Anthropocene is calling into question the legibility of the human. We are invited to spill. The modern citizen is what’s called into question.
Accountability and agency. The afrocene is not an invitation to be well. Notice the molecular, the things we have pushed to the edges might be allies on our co-becoming monsters.
Whiteness reasserts itself through ideas of value. Syncopation is the troubling of this colonial forces. Counter hegemony into something unknown.
Mar Inés
Buto dance.
Find a way away from loneliness. I can’t dance as Mar Inés. What is it to be a body? So much mystery and the body knows. Let’s not know.
For this session you just need a body. Begin awakening the domesticated flesh. Feel a cat in every joint. Rest hanging from the cosmos.
Track all signs of domestication of your body. Explore the potential to move freely. Shed the social body. Do not know what you are doing.
Dance slowly. A seed will turn into a flower. Do not know what kind of flower.
Sophie Strand
I refuse to be well. Failed to integrate trauma. A failure. To be incorrect is to be relational.
What if your illness is incurable? How much does that cost? Can I afford it?
I’m still expected to perform daily rituals of wellness.
Rot is a crucial cycle for the wellness of ecosystems. We are the soil for something else to grow. We ripe, and rot.