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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Disabled Artist Questions the 'Good' Body

One. Two. Three. Four. Motions repeated, counting up to 60, restarting, repeating, repeating.

How long will this continue?

When will it finally end?

These were the questions evoked by “reRace: a movement study,” the first piece of Barack adé Soleil’s keynote performance of this year’s Clifford Symposium “The ‘good’ Body.” In movement, adé Soleil and collaborating dancer Drew Coleman seemed to demand that audience members feel the frustration, confusion and indignation of watching a cycle repeat over and over again. During the post-performance discussion, Soleil tied these emotions to the cycles of racism, discrimination and violence that have continued to perpetuate themselves in our lives.

“If it seemed like it was getting redundant, well, guess what — our lives are becoming redundant,” Soleil said, challenging the audience to recognize the impact of our daily actions on the well-worn grooves of societal habit and unquestioning self-absorption.

Soleil’s performance served as an invitation to pause and reflect on how we might change our behavior. In the program notes, he expressed his desire to broaden the definitions and interpretations of a good body.

“As a queer disabled artist of color, [I am] committed to expressing the beauty of the intersectional body as an inherent reflection of humanity,” Soleil wrote.

The second piece, “turtle,” featured one particularly captivating moment of invitation. As Soleil stood hunched over in the center of the stage, members of the production crew, all clad in black, came to remove his crutches from his hands. Then, nine collaborators rose from their seats in the audience and walked onto the stage to help Soleil from standing position to the floor, before returning to their seats once more. In the post-performance conversation, Soleil described this moment as representative of others’ disregard of his individual will.

“People are always trying to help me. They don’t ask — I kid you not — they just touch,” he said.
In the piece “objects are objects,” the same nine audience participants came one by one onstage to observe “the object”: dancer Drew Coleman covered completely in “what appears to be ethnic cloth,” as special guest prompter and Assistant Professor of Dance Cristal Brown put it.

While each participant surveyed the human objects, Brown described the participants based on what they were wearing and then read the identifiers they had previously written down about themselves. As the participants observed, they themselves became objects observed by the audience. In this exchange, Soleil managed to open up a space for people to act and self-identify as they wished, all while highlighting the fact that the choice to self-identify is a privilege that not everyone has. The piece cultivated
Rachel Frank an awareness of the contrast between the assumptions, judgments and stereotypes we make about people based on visual categories of race, gender and ability (among other identifiers), and the inner sense of identity that cannot be recognized without mutual understanding and respect.

A later piece, entitled “objects are objects,” featured yet another collaboration between Soleil and Coleman. Both clad in black, they moved in unison on a blindingly bright white rectangle on the floor, with audible exhales evidencing their exertion. The glaring symbolism of what it means to be black in a white space was emphasized by moments in which either Coleman or Soleil would exit the white space for a moment to observe the other from the black space outside the illuminated white rectangle. During the final moments of the piece, however, Coleman and Soleil came together to move as one body, punctuated by moments of struggle and stiffness. Eventually, they exited the white rectangle to rest in the black space, bringing the piece to a hushed end.

The “message” behind a dance piece is never very simple. From the tactile smoothness of a hand gliding into a shirt sleeve to the tense stillness of a foot paused in mid-air, each movement in Barack Soleil’s performance could have evoked an interpretation, emotion or reaction distinct to the life experience of the individual audience member. To write about it, then, is to explore the perceptions of the writer’s experience not in an attempt to unpack the performance into discrete units of meaning, but rather to bring attention to any questions or observations that may arise. Dance performance cannot be experienced in a written review, nor can it be summarized objectively — this writing is only to participate in the dialogue incited by the performance as it reverberates in the lives of the experiencers.


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