Abstract Black: Affective Evidentiary

A Symposium

November 2-3, 2023

SLIPPAGE Lab

Louis Hall 226 | 1877 Campus Drive, Evanston

While there continues to be a steady stream of research committed to exploring the terms of Black performance, broadly conceived, there has been little research that explores the nature of affective evidence that might exceed, or not be contained by, the category of Black abstraction in performance. This symposium, funded by the Provost’s Racial Justice Seed Fund, will draw on research in phenomenology and race that explores the structures of feeling that might produce a Black familiar, or a Black sensibility, without obvious reliance on racialized expectations.

We intend to pose further questions: What are the terms of Black performance in terms of an affective evidentiary? How are Black structures of feeling organized to allow Black life to emerge in a fullness of contradictory motivations, manifestations, and meanings? This research project brings together researchers in musicology and performance studies to wonder at the evidentiary processes of abstraction in relation to Black creativity.

We wonder, how can Abstraction prepare audiences for Black presence seemingly devoid of a political content? What are the political concerns of abstraction as a mode of creative thought? How do modes of phenomenology proffer a mean of understanding the complex, asymmetrical motivations and outcomes for Black performance? What sorts of sites of Black life can be made evident within contexts of abstract performance?

Convened by SLIPPAGE director Thomas F. DeFrantz and Ryan Dohoney, Associate Professor of Musicology and Director of Graduate Music Studies

This event is supported by SLIPPAGE and the Office of the Provost Race and Justice Collaborative Seed Fund.

Thomas F. DeFrantz

Professor, Northwestern University

Thomas F. DeFrantz directs SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology; the group explores emerging technology in live performance applications. Books: Routledge Companion to African American Theater and Performance, Choreography and Corporeality: Relay in Motion ( 2016), Black Performance Theory: An Anthology of Critical Readings ( 2014), Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (2002), and Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture (2004). Convenes the Black Performance Theory working group as well as the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance. Recent teaching: University of the Arts Mobile MFA in Dance; ImPulsTanz; New Waves Institute; faculty at Hampshire College, Stanford, Yale, MIT, NYU, University of Nice. Has chaired Program in Women’s and Gender Studies at MIT; the concentration in Physical Imagination at MIT; the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke; and served as President of the Society of Dance History Scholars. DeFrantz acted as a consultant for the Smithsonian Museum of African American Life and Culture, contributing concept and a voice-over for a permanent installation on Black Social Dance that opened with the museum in 2016.

MEDIA

Ryan Wayne Dohoney

Associate Professor, Music Studies, Bienen School of Music

Professor Dohoney is a scholar of U.S. and European modernism and experimentalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His research documents the relationships produced by musical performance and artistic collaboration within interdisciplinary artistic communities. He draws upon insights from ethnomusicology, microhistory, affect theory, religious studies, and phenomenology and combine these interdisciplinary methods with rigorous archival research.

MEDIA:

Dohoney, Ryan. Saving Abstraction : Morton Feldman, the de Menils, and the Rothko Chapel. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019.

ryan.dohoney@northwestern.edu

Yaw Agyeman

Sound Artist and Researcher

YAW has performed on both the theatrical and musical stage. He has toured in the play Red, Black and Green: a blues (MAPP) and performed in the world premiere of the musical, “Mister Chickee’s Funny Money” (Chicago Children’s Theater). The play features music from the Motown Great, Lamont Dozier. He has been featured on VH1’s “Soul Cities”, a show produced by Nelson George that showcases singers in cities all over the country, as well as on the Africa Channel’s, “Soundtracks at Red Kiva”, a program that focuses on artists of African descent. Currently, he is a member of the artistic collaboration, “Black Monks of Mississippi”, headed by the dynamic and prolific, Theaster Gates.

MEDIA:

Janet Dees

Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Block Museum of Art

Janet Dees is the Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University.

Since coming to The Block in 2015, Dees has curated several exhibitions including Hank Willis Thomas: Unbranded (2018); Experiments in Form: Sam Gilliam, Alan Shields, and Frank Stella (2018); Carrie Mae Weems: Ritual and Revolution (2017); and If You Remember, I’ll Remember (2017).

Prior to her appointment at the Block, Dees was curator at SITE Santa Fe, where she worked since 2008. In addition, her experience includes educational and curatorial positions at the New York African Burial Ground Project (now the African Burial Ground National Monument), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Rosenbach Museum and Library, and the Paul R. Jones Collection of African American Art at the University of Delaware. Dees was a part of the curatorial team for Unsettled Landscapes, the inaugural SITElines: New Perspectives on Art of the Americas biennial (2014). Her 2015 exhibition Unsuspected Possibilities: Leonardo Drew, Sarah Oppenheimer, Marie Watt was supported by an Artistic Innovation and Collaboration Grant from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

She is the recipient of a 2018 Curatorial Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to support the development of the forthcoming exhibition A Site of Struggle: Making Meaning of Anti-Black Violence in American Art and Visual Culture and has been an affiliate of Northwestern’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Research since 2018.

MEDIA:

Darrell Jones

Associate Professor of Dance, Columbia College Chicago

Darrell Jones is an Associate Professor in the Department of Dance whose specializations are Contemporary Dance Technique, Improvisation, Contact Improvisation, Movement for Actors, Conditioning, Pedagogy,with his area of research focusing on mechanisms of oppression and liberatory practices.

Darrell has received choreographic fellowships from MANCC (Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography), CDF (Chicago Dancemakers Forum) and has additionally been a recipient of the Wesleyan University Creative Campus Fellow (2017), MAP Fund (2017) and Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation.

A two-time Bessie Award recipient for his collaborative work with Bebe Miller Company (Landing Place) his most recent research into (e)feminized ritual performance (Hoo-Ha).

For the past ten years, his artistic research has found its central focus through a conversation between his postmodern training and the voguing aesthetic. Through years of experimenting and analyzing oppression as it lives in the body, Darrell seeks to excavate how individuals accumulate identity and mirror culture through movement.

Darrell has a BA in Psychology from the University of Florida and a MFA in Dance from Florida State University.

MEDIA:

Jayve Montgomery

Sound Artist and Researcher

Jamaican and Louisiana Creole descent, Abstract Black / Jayve Montgomery was born at Ft. Hood, Texas on the last day of 1979 and raised a dependent of the department of defense in Berlin, Germany, before and after the wall; Rayne, Louisiana, before the frogs left; Columbia, SC, a home of the confederate flag; and Ft. Campbell, KY, home of the 101st Airborne Division. Montgomery received a double BA in Japanese Studies and Anthropology from Centre College of KY and has also studied sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

He is a Nashville sound artist and multi-instrumentalist of the Chicago school of Free, Creative, and Improvised musics, Sonic Healing Ministries sector. He was Senior Program Specialist for the Chicago Park District’s Inferno Mobile Recording Studio (2006-2013), a collaborative sound making program for youth and people with disabilities. He was also a curator and artist-in-residence at Brown Rice (2008-2012), an art space for listening in Chicago, IL.

Since moving to Nashville, he has become an integral member of the improvised and experimental music scene of the city and region; gaining local recognition for Nashville Scene solo performance of the year 2019; and becoming alum of Pitchfork Music Festival (Standing on the Corner), High Zero Festival of Improvised and Experimental Music, and True/False Film and Music Festival. 2021 has taken Montgomery on two tours of France with The Bridge.

MEDIA

Julian Terrell Otis

Vocal Artist and Researcher

Julian Terrell Otis is a vocalist dedicated to the advancement of Black music in America, spanning genres from creative music and jazz, to contemporary classical. His work explores the limitless possibilities of his instrument’s expressive capacity through song, improvisation, and theater. Known for bringing fresh perspective, nuance, and “high drama” to the contemporary music world, the integration of performance “live art” elements is of particular interest to him. Otis’s experiences have led him to create the male soloist role in George E. Lewis’ chamber opera, Afterword, on both domestic and international stages. In exploring the life and work of Julius Eastman, Otis has performed his solo work, Prelude for the Holy Presence of Joan of Arc. He revived Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King at the inaugural Bang on a Can All Star’s Loud Weekend, and is devising works focusing on improvisation, electronics, and movement. All the Pretty Flowers is his first recording project of improvised music and poetry. Committed to community empowerment, he led an improvised jam for South Side Chicago communities called Self Care = Resistance!

Tina Post

Assistant Professor, English Language and Literature | University of Chicago

Tina Post is a performance studies scholar primarily interested in how Blackness is communicated (and how it is solidified or subverted) in theater, movement, visual culture, and the performances of everyday life. She is currently at work on her first book, “Deadpan,” which theorizes expressionlessness and affective withholding in African American cultural and artistic production.

Her scholarly writings have appeared in TDR/The Drama Review, Modern Drama, and the International Review of African American Art. Her new work is forthcoming in ASAP/J, published by the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, and in the edited volume Race and Performance after Repetition (Duke University Press, 2020). She has published creative nonfiction essays in ImaginedTheatres.com, The Appendix, and Stone Canoe.

Most recently, Post was a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago. She holds an MFA in creative writing and literary arts from the University of Alaska Anchorage and a PhD in African American studies from Yale University. While at Yale, she was the recipient of the Sylvia Ardyn Boone Prize for the best written work on African American art and a finalist for the Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize for best doctoral dissertation from the American Studies Association.

MEDIA:

Post, Tina. Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression. NYU Press, 2023.

Post, Tina. “I Will Will Against Your Way: On Black Embodiment and Poetic Discomposure.” ASAP Journal 6, no. 1 (2021): 123–44.