The Brutal Joy

The Brutal Joy unfurls Black vernacular line dance and sartorial gesture as intellectual discourse, reverie, and devotion to Black-living. As a scored improvisation for dance, light, and sound, The Brutal Joy explores these diasporic practices as knowledge reservoirs and outward facing, physically dialogic activations that allow for actualizing oneself at present in a dance of future possibilities. The performers' attention oscillates between compositional structures of the riff, the vamp, and the break, while attending to the mutually dependent processes of individuation and ritualization. Gesture, gait, gaze, rhythm, textural sound, shadow, and light are the materials for proposing “What if?” and “Now what?” as provisional questions towards imagining otherwise. Centering dance and attire as relational and living counter-archives, the work considers movement and personal style as tools for self-determination and the collective reclamation of Black humanitarian value.