James Baldwin—I AM NOT AN EXTERNALITY #1
Part of my non-spatial/ non-temporal call & response with my viewer is my most recent dance piece in which my head and various body parts are bound in bubble wrap (plastic used for shipping consumer products) as, on a balance beam at the Paradise Theatre, I move/ dance/ dialogue with James Baldwin’s “I Am Not Your Negro” film (2016 German-American documentary, social critique film essay directed by Raoul Peck, based on Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript Remember This House. Narrated by Samuel Jackson) projected across me. Jackson’s narration of Baldwin’s story, the rustling of the suffocating, dancing plastic, and the precarious contact of my feet on edge form the co-mingling soundscape.
Our Common Body (Fernand Deligny)
Through recorded and altered video of my mind-body conversations, as I danced, I sought verbal language that elicit embryological states in which the brain has not yet been divided from the belly–the pre-cerebral brain in which the navel is called “life-stem” or “life-root” in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Relating to the enteric nervous system in the gut, and perhaps the “tiny brain” in the heart, both of which have connections to the vagus nerve. A pre-divided mind-body state, this correlates to our earliest connection to this life, through our “imprint”–that which we receive from our parents through the blood—the epigenetic imprint. These pieces inspired a series of my collaborative dialogues including Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and Christianna Deichmann from the Association for Prenatal & Perinatal Psychology & Health (APPPAH).
The soundscape is that of the viewer listening to their own breath, their ruach, their collective soul (trickstering with Fernand Deligny’s “Common Body”–investigative practices with autistic children in the context of Deleuze and Guattari). During this piece I conceptualized my new video lecture series on neurotypicality in the context of industrial consumer-waste convenience culture. I first presented this at Brown University, 2023 as a guest lecturer in the art department.
Collaborations
with Micaela Amateau Amato, Cara’s mother and primary collaborator
Dematerializing PetroCulture
The below glazed ceramic torso (by Micaela Amateau Amato) is titled Woman with Burned Head. Interior cellular damage seeps to the surface of the body, burning its way to outr skin. This is caused by petro-toxins that permeate our lives from polymers and plastics, to infinitely small clusters of polluted air particles almost undetectable but more insidious, that attack the body’s ability to breath and recover. Because they combine and multiply with numerous other unseen toxins, these fine atmospheric particles, tiny tar balls, are the most lethal pollutants. The accompanying analog photographic image from Gestation Project, Singles (by Cara Judea Alhadeff) is of a bed-ridden pregnant woman-with-twins lying in front of the Chevron Refinery in Richmond/SF Bay area that had caught fire, emitting toxic gases into the air and water. From the origins of our plastic-addicted convenience-culture, environmental racism saturates the narratives of the women depicted in both photograph and sculpture.
Performance Art Collaborations
These 11 images come from my many year collaboration with Kunstoff Dance Company, as my photographs projected on sculptural surfaces and dancers’ bodies’.
Performed at:
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Bay Area Now: In-Sight San Francisco, California
Oberlin Dance Company (ODC), San Francisco, California
Velocity Dance Center, Seattle, WA
Southern Theater, Minneapolis, MI
Oberlin Dance Company (ODC), CA
Tongue and Trigger, Jon Sims Center for the Arts, San Francisco
A six year collaboration with performance artist, Nicole Sumner
Photo Shoots
