Choreographer and dance theorist Michael Bodel talks with Thomas DeFrantz, a performer, writer and Professor of Dance and African American Studies at Duke University. DeFrantz is a featured artist in the Parallels Platform at Danspace Project, curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones, which explores notions of blackness and postmodernism “in the age of Obama,” as Houston-Jones has written in the Parallels catalogue, for which DeFrantz was a featured essayist. On March 27, DeFrantz will present his Performing Black lecture at Danspace Project as a part of an evening titled This & That.
Interview Date: March 9, 2012
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Michael Bodel: The last time I saw you was at the CORD Conference, which felt like a perfect setup for thinking about a piece that straddles the academic and live arts performance scenes. Historically there has been this division between the doing of dance and the talking about or the writing about dance, and I was wondering how you are thinking about Performing Black, and how it might be something that is more a “doing about”.
Thomas DeFrantz: Yes. African American dance or black dance traditions are always concerned with their own distribution, or their own fertileness. In the center of these structures is a tradition of explaining or demonstrating what it is that you do. These are the dance instruction songs—basically any song that tells you what dance to do, and how to do it. We find these back in the 1800’s or the 20th century and even contemporary songs that tell you the steps to do while you are doing it: “get low,” “pop it,” “bounce with me,” “lean back.”
Michael: It’s interesting—this set of Africanist aesthetics that you and other scholars have worked to identify or explore or talk around, you are not only talking about them, but trying to apply them to the actual structure of Performing Black.
Thomas: I think that’s right, but I don’t know if it’s “applying” so much as “recognizing”; I think there’s a difference in tone. When you work on aesthetics, one thing that happens is that you recognize that things are already in motion; we tend to say “always already” in motion. So it’s not so much about bringing pressure to bear to make things happen in a black way, it’s about recognizing that these things are already circulating. So a really strong tradition among African American artists has always been to explain the thing that is being done. And not always in words, necessarily, but in order to account for it; that’s been an aesthetic imperative: that you should account for the thing you are doing as you do it. Because if this concept is an Africanist aesthetics ground-zero, then it makes sense to offer a performative lecture that does that too. It fits right into that foundational tradition and ideology.
Michael: What is it that you hope that a performative lecture can do and can bring to the content that an article can’t… or a straight-up lecture or a book?
Thomas: The implication of a lecture in a classroom or a book is that, as the receiver of the information, you sit back in your seat and accept the information; you take the information from the page and you process it. But this is different from what happens when we go to see a performance, because performance opens our energy up toward the stage or event and the other people in the room. We open our energy up to the possibility of something unexpected happening or something unprecedented materializing. Performance offers a really different way for us to circulate energy than we do in relationship to a lecture or a book. And so performative-lectures kind of get those two things in line with each other. I am a fan of thinking that audiences are really, really smart, and that it’s really okay to challenge audiences to think through ideas with their bodies and their energy. The ideas can be complicated and that’s okay.
Michael: To that tune of not underestimating your audiences, in the article that you wrote [for the Parallels catalogue], “the complex path to 21st century black live art”, you talk about how predominant it is that artists practicing in the field now have under-grad or even grad education in dance or dance studies. How has that shaped your consideration of this piece —knowing that that is who comprises the audience?
Thomas: It’s definitely true that people are going to college and becoming dancers, and that’s been going on for at least two generations, especially in postmodern and contemporary dance. People are doing undergraduate work and thinking through concepts and writing about stuff while they are figuring out how to move and make dances. I recently saw a piece with Ishmael and I was chatting with him about the young artists’ work; he told me all the schools that they had gone to. And there was this assumption that him telling me that would help me understand who they were. And in a way it does, because I can sort of understand a difference between someone educated at Wesleyan or at Swarthmore or at Yale or someone who went to CSU Long Beach. It gives a certain sense of ‘place’ for the emerging artists, and that’s just what’s up in 2012.
Michael: Maybe it has replaced [the question of] who was your technique teacher?
Thomas: I think that is exactly right. We still have these lineages, but a lot of the older [choreographers and teachers] are moving on, or are not teaching so much, or have transitioned already. So now it’s more about what it is that you’ve been reading or what it is that you’ve been thinking about as much as who were your technique teachers.
Michael: To continue down this road, if we take the overlapping of these two previously more distinct sections of people involved in dance: the doers and then the academics. Seeing that they are now overlapping more in a wonderful way, and how dance has exploded as an academic discipline, I wonder as you are doing this performance what you think of the insularity of that community? How talking about establishing a new understanding of what black dance is and the legacy of black contributions being elided, how you think that that might be able to spread from this very insular academic/artist practitioner community to a larger conception of modern dance and black dance.
Thomas: Well first of all, you can’t be a person on the planet without a relationship to black art. It’s just not possible. Everything we understand about popular culture, in terms of what we know about filmmaking and music and music video, black art has been the engine, an often invisible engine, but more and more recognized. [It] has been the engine for people figuring out how to communicate through performance. It’s a legacy of the very peculiar institution of slavery, of course, but also the Middle Passage, as that distillation that capitalist American marketplace put Africanist aesthetics to use.
You can’t have William Forsythe without a relationship to jazz and funk; you can’t have Balanchine without a relationship to tap; you can’t have Trisha Brown without a relationship to black social dance release and doing-your-own-thing. It’s these sorts of tropes in contemporary performance or modern dance that all have a relationship to African American and Africanist performance. That doesn’t mean that black performance is the only thing that’s there, I’m not trying to say that, I’m just saying that it is central to how we understand what movement can do.
So that said, a performance-lecture like Performing Black is about how to highlight those points of recognition and highlight in a humorous and ironic way the possibility of recognizing and acknowledging and appreciating a kind of black presence in performance, and then also trying to bust that open and break that apart.
Michael: I was thinking about Ishmael’s titling of the original Parallels series, and that word “parallel” which, from what I understand, was chosen because the series was looking at artists that were operating parallel to what was at the time the dominant image of black dance, which was an Ailey descendancy. Do you think that still exists now? Is hip-hop the new face of that dominant image? Or do you think that now black dance is dispersed enough that everything is already parallel.
Thomas: When Ishmael made the Parallels title, one way he was thinking, that you suggest, was what else is there besides the opera-house/Alvin Ailey position that was going on at the time? What was the downtown space for black artists, for visibly black people? Now it’s 2012, things are different. We have lots of mixed race people in the world, and people claim black, or they don’t claim black, or they pass for white, or pass for white/Latino, and there are lots of ways to live on the planet. And now we are much more concerned with aesthetics as ideology or concepts than we are with visible markers of blackness to define a black community. So I think that once we are willing to think about these areas as philosophical dialogues or aesthetic imperatives then what happens is we are more concerned with possibilities and capacities than we are with fixing things and making them smaller.
It used to be that black dance meant a particular thing and you had to do things a certain way to be in black dance, and I think that has really shifted. Now we can talk about Africanist aesthetics as capacities and opportunities rather than narrowing downs and limitations. I think that this difference is crucial.
Michael: Do you see any downfalls to such a broad definition [of black dance]? You and Carl Paris and many others have talked about the multitude of possible definitions. Do you see any potential problem with losing some specificity or some power of what black dance is?
Thomas: Race is a really funny thing in the world still, and I think the most difficult thing to express across racial divisions is how race functions as a gathering notion. One thing that happens with black people, or people who identify as black or have been identified as black, [is that] they begin to experience the world in terms of a connection with people who are like them in this way. And then what happens is it becomes really possible to say, “yeah black means all these things.” But the part that you can’t express is the part that connects you in these emotional, physiognomic, experiential ways. I think when all these authors and artists are talking about whether this is black dance or not black dance, there is a meta-conversation that is not being articulated that’s about the connection itself. I think that connection is that thing that we are all trying to articulate and move forward, even if we aren’t able to talk about it as such. When we watch dances by people who aren’t visibly black or don’t identify as black, we can look at that program and go “yeah, that’s a black thing too.” We can understand experientially what it is that is outside of the group, but the assumption is that the group is still functioning somehow. That’s where conversations about race fall apart, because it’s very hard to articulate, but if you experience it, you can get it.
Michael: It sounds like the downfall of computer programs that we know can do “x” number of calculations a second, but still have a hard time recognizing basic things that we [humans] just get, or feel or smell.
Thomas: Right on. Empathy is an algorithm that is without end. There’s no way to program or digitize empathy because it’s a shifting target, it’s something that is largely about becoming. Empathy or connectivity are vectors of experience that really can’t be reduced yet to code. Writing is code; language is code. As we are now understanding things more and more in terms of neurobiology and what is actually happening in the body in terms of energy, we also understand how much we can’t turn into that model or code.
Michael: We’ve managed to go three-fourths of the interview without talking about what we are going to be seeing onstage. Can you describe the format of it?
Thomas: Well that’s the great thing. I don’t really know what you are going to see, and you don’t either! It’ll be a great deal of improvisation; improvisation is foundational to black art and I’m always interested in letting things go as they will. I know I want to make something happen in relation to what Adrian Piper did with her funk lectures in the 1980’s and what Jawole Willa Jo Zollar does with her performative lectures about dancing black and black social dance. I want you to learn something about black dance, in quotes; scare quotes. What is it and how do we do it? That’s mostly what we will work on is “how do we do it?” So we will go through some readings together; this is stuff you should have read. If you haven’t read it, your grade will be reviewed [laughs].
Michael: Homework [laughing]
Thomas: And we’ll go through some videos together and I’ll take your questions at some point. It’s definitely going to be participatory on all levels. You are going to really have to come willing to think about what it is to be a black artist making work.
Michael: Are there any lessons from your previous incarnations of theory-ography that you think were fertile or worked, or [that] you are looking to apply to Performing Black?
Thomas: One thing I learned in theory-ography is that it’s really hard for us to shift into the multi-modal reception that academic text calls for. Text still tends to make our energy respond in really different ways than performance without text does. I’ve learned that the more text there is, the more space an audience needs to try to make sense of it. It’s really hard to let go of that wanting to make sense of it, especially with language. Even when it’s poetic or evocative. And academic text tends not to be poetic or evocative, but on the nose, and that creates different challenges for all of us in the room.
Michael: You’ve been studying dance and black dance for so long; in this new excavation is there any person or historical moment that you’ve stumbled upon that you are eager to inject into the lineage of black dance in America?
Thomas: Re-injecting the social into the performative. This is the thing I’m really interested in now. Adrian Piper, when she did her Funk Lessons, was really curious what would happen if she taught white people funk lessons. And that says a lot because funk is one of those forms that really defies a verbal or literary representation. Historically, funk is really an attitude or feeling more than any other class of black social dance. So she did this great thing in museums or cultural centers, where she would teach these funk lessons as performance art projects. I’m really curious about rethinking that idea about this reinsertion of the social into these other kinds of spaces and seeing what can happen.
It’s not a new thing; it goes back to the 19th century when Aida Walker in New York was teaching African American social dance to audiences who had never done it before and didn’t know what it was. I think it’s really ripe, in this time when identity is more fluid and racial identity is, not controversial, but certainly debatable as a category.
Michael: So interesting. I hope this moves on to become a Ted Talk. [laughs]
Thomas: [laughing] Right on.
